Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Zymogenetics Q1 2009 - Edited

We recorded net RECOTHROM product sales of $4.5 million for the quarter compared to $1 million in the first quarter of 2008. As Stephen indicated in his comments, this number was impacted significantly by the change in wholesaler inventories over the course of the quarter. By March 31, wholesaler inventories had declined to 3 to 4 weeks of trailing sales which is what we consider to be a normal level. Therefore, we don’t expect second quarter sales to be materially impacted by wholesaler inventory changes, and our reported net sales should generally reflect the underlying demand from hospital accounts.
From the Q&A........

Brian Abrahams -Oppenheimer

I wanted to drill down a little bit more on something Stephen said earlier about pursuing strategic and tactical initiatives to try to improve RECOTHROM’s market competitiveness. I was wondering if you could maybe give us a few more details about where your efforts will be focused going forward.

Also, I know you have talked in the past about educating physicians about making a link between coagulopathies that develop and looking for antithrombin antibodies and I was just wondering what the receptivity among the physicians has been of to those efforts.

Doug Williams

We would prefer not to get into too much detail for obvious reasons about some of the tactical initiatives that Stephen currently has under way. I do think that one area that is imporant is, as you point out, this notion of helping to educate the marketplace to the ongoing nature of coagulopathies that develop and also how to be able to identify those. That is certainly one part of our strategy for really defining one of the major differentiating charactersistics of our drug versus thrombin JMI.