Good afternoon, and welcome to Genmab's 2022 annual general meeting. We are pleased to once again see so many of you in person, finally, and welcome also those of you joining us via webcast. I'm Deirdre Connolly, Chair of Genmab's Board of Directors. I would like to begin by introducing the other members of our board. Deputy Chair, Pernille Erenbjerg, Anders Gersel Pedersen, Paolo Paoletti, who's connecting through webcast, and Rolf Hoffmann. We also have three newly elected employee board members, Martin Schultz, Takahiro Hamatani, and Mijke Zachariasse. I would like to thank our previous employee board members, Peter Storm Kristensen and Rima Nassar, for their contributions over the years.
Next, our company's executive managers, Jan van de Winkel, Genmab's Chief Executive Officer, Anthony Pagano, the company's Chief Financial Officer, Judith Klimovsky, Chief Development Officer, Anthony Mancini, Genmab's Chief Operating Officer, Birgitte Stephensen, Genmab's Chief Legal Officer, and Chris Cozic, Genmab's Chief People Officer. To officially start the proceedings for today's meeting, I would now like to introduce Jørgen Madsen, Genmab's external legal advisor, who will be the chair of our annual general meeting. Jørgen, I give you the floor.
Thank you very much. Thank you for appointing me chairman of the meeting. I look forward to a good and orderly meeting this afternoon. True to tradition, the AGM in Genmab is simultaneously translated. We have interpreters at the back of the room. If you wish to pick up a headset, if you haven't picked up one yet, in order to hear the translation into Danish or English, please raise a hand, and we'll bring you a headset. If everyone has one, we will tick that box. Also, we have web streaming of the meeting, and if anyone wishes to take the floor, for technical reasons and for COVID-19 reasons, you don't want to go to the rostrum up here, but you will go to the white column where there's a microphone.
In that way, we can all see you, and we can all hear you because you will then be, it will be broadcast, and we will also be able to see you on the screens up here. That's the way we have chosen to do it. The formalities. We need to check that the convening notice is legal and lawful. First of all, the AGM must be held in the right place, the municipality of Copenhagen or Greater Copenhagen, and we are right smack in the middle of Copenhagen, so that's okay. It must be sent out in due time, which is four months after the expiry of the fiscal year at the latest. The right notice must be given minimum three weeks, max five weeks.
I can tell you that there was an announcement made on the company's website and also by the sending of a company release to Nasdaq Copenhagen on the 24th of February. Also, a written notice has been sent to registered shareholders who have requested to receive such a written memo. The agenda, complete proposals, annual report, and any other relevant information required under Danish company law has been made available on the company's website with due notice of the three-week notice period. There is nothing in the agenda that require the presence of a specific proportion of shareholders or share-voting capital. Against this backdrop, I find that the AGM has been duly convened, is legal and lawful, and is quorate. If there are no objections to this from anyone, I will enter that in the protocol. Thank you very much. Right.
Also, very briefly, let's have a look at the agenda. The first two items have to do with the company's report on the activities during the past year and a presentation and adoption of the audited annual report 2021. Also in this connection, discharge from liability to members of board of directors and executive management. I propose that we deal with these two items in one go. The Chairman of the Board, Deirdre Connelly, will be the first one to speak, and she will be followed and complemented by the CEO of the company, Jan van de Winkel, and the CFO, Anthony Pagano, who will take over. They will deal with it, these three people. We have item three, distribution of profits. Item four, presentation of the compensation report. Five, election of board members. Item six, election of auditor.
Seven, proposals from the board of directors. In this connection, I can inform you that we have received no proposals from shareholders. We have one proposal from the board concerning remuneration to the board of directors. Then we have item eight, the usual authorization to the chair of the general meeting, and then nine, any other business. I can inform you that today, just under 47% of the voting capital is represented at the meeting. I can also inform you that because of the received postal votes and proxies, the required majority is present for the adoption of all proposals included in the agenda today. Now, with these words of introduction, I'd like to hand over to Deirdre Connelly, the Chairman of the Board, for a report on the company's activities. You have the floor, madam.
Thank you, Jørgen. First, I need to draw your attention to the fact that this presentation will include forward-looking statements as we have noted in the past, as Genmab is a biotech business and drug development is not always a straightforward journey. It is important to understand that what we discuss today is our aim, and that there may be external events that cause us to change course in the future. Genmab has an ambitious vision that by 2025, our own product has transformed cancer treatment. This vision reflects the bold core purpose of the company, the development of innovative antibody products with the potential to improve the lives of patients. To achieve our vision, Genmab has been growing and evolving into a fully integrated biotech innovation powerhouse.
While this growth has meant many changes for the company, we have been able to maintain our focus on the core purpose of improving patients' lives due to the strength of our values and unique company culture. Our core values of passion for innovation, determination for excellence, integrity, and working as one team are fully supported by a culture where patients come first and our ideas and decisions are rooted in science. Genmab also fosters a culture where colleagues respect and celebrate differences and have the freedom to speak up and empower one another. The approval of Tivdak, a first for Genmab, would not have been possible without our inspiring team members who are dedicated to bringing our core values and culture to life. We now have a short film for you to bring one of these cultural pillars to life. Patients come first. Let's play the video, please.
At Genmab, we're inspired by nature and the power of the immune system to transform cancer treatment with the aim of improving the lives of patients.
I was most afraid of putting my life on hold, but thanks to decades of research, cancer was only a chapter in my life rather than the whole book.
For us, patients come first. They are our reason for being, actualized in our creation and development of innovative and differentiated antibody products aimed at raising the standard of living for people living with devastating diseases.
Options for new treatments are what have kept me strong through my diagnosis. The promise of new advances in treatment have given me the confidence needed to fight my disease.
Cancer presents constant challenges in our society.
No one fights alone. These words carried me through my treatments as I realized how many people were behind me.
Challenges like advancing drug development and fulfilling the medical needs of patients.
We have to tell our stories and spread awareness so that other people don't have to go through what we went through. When it comes to us, the individual patients, of course, we want things to happen overnight. I know that it's happening, but when you're impacted directly by cancer, you want that change to come about as quickly as possible.
At Genmab, we work to transform the future of cancer treatment. We're rooted in science and inspired by patients.
We hope you found that film inspiring. I know I do. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for supporting us as we move closer to achieving our vision of transforming cancer treatment. Now I would like to hand over the meeting to Genmab's CEO, Jan van de Winkel. Jan will discuss in greater detail Genmab's accomplishments in 2021, as well as our key goals and plans for 2022. Jan.
Thank you, Deirdre, and thank you to everyone joining today. I'm really pleased to provide a brief overview of our recent successes and share a glimpse of what you can expect from Genmab in 2022. Due to our extraordinarily solid foundation, Genmab is extremely well-positioned to achieve our ambitious vision of making a difference for patients by transforming cancer treatments. I would like to begin with a reminder of some of the many successes that will fuel our future growth. Next slide. The 39 INDs created by Genmab or with our technologies have led to a robust and expanding clinical pipeline with five approved medicines, including Tivdak, the first Genmab-owned product on the market, which we are co-developing and co-promoting in the U.S. with Seagen. Royalties from partner-owned medicines, plus key partnerships with companies like AbbVie, have expanded our revenue significantly.
Our strong recurring revenue allows us to continue to invest in next-generation technologies and truly differentiated new antibody therapies and in our company, where we added commercialization capabilities and are further strengthening our world-class unstoppable team with key talents. Our growing internal competencies are enabling us to evolve into an integrated end-to-end international biotech, led by an experienced and diverse leadership team. We built on this solid track record with the events of 2021, so now let's take a look at some of our recent achievements. 2021 is our ninth year of profitability with an impressive 48% increase in revenue versus 2020, excluding the one-time AbbVie upfront payments we received in 2020. Our strong balance sheet allows us to strategically invest in our capabilities and differentiated product pipeline, including our first product launch.
While we are evolving into a fully integrated end-to-end biotech, we know that we can accelerate innovation by strategically investing in collaborations with partners across the pharma and biotech ecosystem who can provide us with building blocks that support our future pipeline expansion, novel targets, novel payloads, and technology that complements our own. In 2021, we entered into more than 10 collaborations that will add to the breadth of our suite of technologies and support the rapid growth of our innovative next-generation pipeline of antibody therapeutics. For example, we partnered with Bolt on its immunostimulatory antibody-drug conjugates or ADCs and with Synaffix on its topoisomerase-1 inhibitor ADCs. We are seeing the results of our investments in collaboration and capabilities in our expanding and progressively maturing pipeline.
Examples of recent investigational medicines entering the clinic are HexaBody-CD38 and DuoBody-CD3xB7-H4 , and I apologize for all the funny names here, but that's simply how the products are called. Both these products are the products of our highly productive R&D engine. In addition to growth, our product pipeline also matured over the past 12 months, and the highlight of the year was undoubtedly the FDA's accelerated approval of Tivdak, our first regulatory approval and a much-needed new potential treatment option for patients with metastatic cervical cancer. With Seagen, we have a robust development plan for Tivdak, including the first phase III study initiated in 2021. This is intended to confirm Tivdak's benefit in recurrent or metastatic cervical cancer and to support further global regulatory applications.
Epcoritamab also entered phase III development in 2021, the first of multiple phase III studies that we and our partner, AbbVie, are planning for epcoritamab. Both of our investigational medicines under development with BioNTech also advanced last year with the first phase II study for DuoBody-PD-L1x4-1BB and multiple expansion cohorts initiated in the phase I/II study of DuoBody-CD40x4-1BB. New and updated data from all of these programs and others were presented at a variety of prestigious conferences throughout the year, and we are anticipating additional data presentations this year. Next slide, please. In addition to our own pipeline, Genmab's innovations are applied in the pipelines of multiple global pharmaceutical and biotech companies. In particular, our DuoBody technology platform has powered a variety of bispecific antibody therapies in development.
The most advanced of these, amivantamab and teclistamab, are the result of our DuoBody collaboration with Janssen. In 2021, Janssen's amivantamab was approved as Rybrevant in the United States, Europe, and other markets for the treatment of certain patients with lung cancer with EGFR exon 20 insertion mutations. These are the first regulatory approvals for a therapy that was created using the DuoBody bispecific technology platform. Subsequently, at the end of last year, Janssen submitted a BLA to the FDA for teclistamab for the treatment of relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma. In January this year, Janssen furthermore submitted a marketing authorization application or MAA for teclistamab to the European Medicines Agency. These events provided further validation for our DuoBody technology platform, which also powers the majority of our own product pipeline.
Darzalex, which has redefined the treatment of multiple myeloma, continued to evolve in 2021 with new approvals, including the approval of the subcutaneous formulation of daratumumab as the first and only approved therapy for AL amyloidosis. Sales of Darzalex for the year were very strong, with J&J reporting about $6 billion in net sales, an increase of 44% over 2020, resulting in DKK 6,135 million in royalties to Genmab. Next slide, please. Beyond strong revenue, 2021 was an excellent year for Genmab. As we continue to focus on our core purpose, we are preparing for an equally momentous 2022. Let's start with our most advanced products. For epcoritamab, as I mentioned, we are very much looking forward to expanding its development. We are excited about the data, and we anticipate filing in the U.S. and/or in Europe this year.
Further, the Genmab and AbbVie teams are hard at work and gearing up to initiate new phase III studies to maximize epco's potential. As part of these preparations, we are going to collect more data on epco dosing, and due to recent FDA guidelines recommending that sponsors perform more formal dose evaluation studies, that means that for some of the phase IIIs, the first patients dosed could be pushed beyond 2022. As Anthony will discuss in a few moments, the investment will already start this year. We will work with Seagen to continue to broaden the clinical development program for Tivdak and establish it as a clear choice for patients with metastatic cervical cancer, with disease progression on or after chemotherapy.
We very much look forward to progressing the next steps for both of our first-in-class bispecific next generation immunotherapy candidates, and that's a whole mouthful for many of you, in development with BioNTech. Beyond these maturing programs, we anticipate expanding and advancing our other early-stage programs, including the potential for additional INDs or CTAs this year. Finally, we intend to continue to scale our organization based on our planned portfolio development, and as Anthony will discuss, we will use our solid financial base to support our growth. We have a lot to look forward to in the next nine months, and we very much look forward to sharing that progress with you. Next slide, please. Our laser sharp strategy has brought us very close to reaching our inspirational 2025 vision, which Deirdre already spoke about.
This vision has acted as our guiding light, anchored as it is in our core purpose to fundamentally improve the lives of cancer patients. As of today, our first medicine has been launched, and we are anticipating a second one in the near term. These give us a strong rationale to make focused investments so that we can make the most of the opportunities that are ahead of us. We continue to be disciplined in our approach, and we are confident that as we look to the future, we will see the realization of continued evolution into a fully integrated biotech innovation powerhouse. Thank you for your attention and for your continued support. I hope that all of you will remain healthy, keep optimistic. I see lots of you smiling, and stay safe.
For any of you who may have direct family ties to Ukraine or have friends there, please know that our thoughts are with you. I hope that common sense prevails in the coming days and weeks. Our thoughts are with everyone affected by war in Ukraine and elsewhere in the world. At Genmab, we aim to be a guiding light, showcasing that we can be one team as people with roots from all over the world collaborating towards an inspiring vision. At this point, I want to hand over to my colleague, Anthony Pagano, our CFO, to discuss the 2021 financials as well as our 2022 financial guidance. Anthony, the floor is yours. Thank you.
Great. You know, thanks, Jan, and it's great to be here today with all of you, and it's really nice to be doing this again in person after the last two years. Let's get started. We've never been in a better position to achieve our vision of transforming the lives of cancer patients. My objective today is twofold. First, to explain why 2021 has been yet another remarkable year for Genmab. Second, to provide our guidance for 2022, which is set to be another very strong year. Overall, we continue to strengthen our foundation and drive towards our 2025 vision. We executed our first commercial launch, bringing Tivdak to cervical cancer patients. We grew recurring revenue by 48% in 2021. This was driven by strong royalties from Darzalex and other approved medicines. As Jan said, that's ensured our ninth consecutive year of profitability.
Our strong balance sheet and growing recurring revenues allowed us to continue to invest in our business and our pipeline in a very focused and disciplined way. An important part of this has been to continue to build the team and capabilities to enable us to succeed. Let's take a look at those revenues in a bit more detail on the next slide. As I've just said, our recurring revenues grew by 48% in 2021. Jan already mentioned Darzalex and the very strong performance there. We're also encouraged by the growth of Kesimpta and Tepezza, which generated DKK 828 million of royalties for 2021. That's an increase of more than DKK 500 million compared to last year. This growth really illustrates the power of our recurring revenues.
Our revenue profile continues to get stronger with increases both in recurring and non-recurring revenues after excluding, of course, the AbbVie one-off. We're taking those revenues and investing in a highly focused way. Total operating expenses were DKK 5.5 billion in 2021. Here you can see exactly where we invested. We accelerated our investment into our product portfolio, especially the advancement of both Epco and DuoBody-CD40x4-1BB. We've also spent more on expanding our team to support our growth and commercialization, and importantly, continuing to invest in enhanced technology and systems and other areas related to our expanding product pipeline. Of course, that includes supporting the launch of Tivdak and preparing for the filing and potential launch for Epco.
Finally, we're leveraging the AbbVie collaboration by utilizing their significant expertise as well as their significant financial contributions to further expand and accelerate our partnership programs. Now, let's take a look at our financials as a whole on the next page. Here you can see our summary P&L. In 2021, revenue came in at approximately DKK 8.5 billion. Now, excluding the AbbVie one-off, that's up 48% on last year. Total expenses were about DKK 5.5 billion, with 77% being R&D and 23% SG&A. We reported a very strong operating profit at around DKK 3 billion. Our net financial items amounts to income of DKK 965 million, which was primarily driven by the strengthening of the US dollar against the Danish kroner on our US dollar-denominated cash and investments.
We have tax expense of DKK 975 million, and this equates to an effective tax rate of 24.5%. That brings us to our net profit of around DKK 3 billion. As you can see, extremely strong financial performance for 2021. Let's move now to a reminder of our robust financial framework. First off, let's think about our revenue profile, which you can see on the left. At the beginning of 2020, Darzalex was the only product on the market. Today, we have five, and that provides us with expected recurring revenue growth of 39% in 2022. Importantly and excitingly, there's a clear path to potentially expand the number of approved products with Janssen's recent BLA for teclistamab, and most excitingly, our planned submission for epcoritamab in 2022.
Taken together, we expect significant cash inflows for us in the years to come. Now moving to the right, we continue to be focused in our investments as we evolve our organization for continued success. Right at the top of the list is accelerating and expanding the development of Epcoritamab. Now, I'm going to spend a moment and take a closer look at our ever-stronger rationale for increasing our investment. Now, what you can see here on the left is a powerful combination of both our technologies and our pipeline. These are what really underpin our imperative to invest. On the right, you can see the real progress that we're making. 2021 was a great year with more than 20 active clinical trials, as well as bringing our first product to market with Tivdak.
Building on that super strong foundation, 2022 is gonna see another real step up in terms of our opportunity set with more than 30 active clinical trials anticipated and preparation for a potential Epco regulatory submission and commercialization in the U.S. To be clear, based upon the work we've done so far, the data that we've seen, we're convinced that Epco is a drug that really has the potential to make a difference for patients. As we've told you before, if we want to seize this meaningful opportunity, we've got to invest, and that's exactly what we're doing. Now, having looked at the financial framework, our very strong rationale to invest, let's look at how this all comes together in our 2022 guidance.
Looking at the guidance, we expect our revenue to be in the range of DKK 10.8 billion-DKK 12 billion. As you can see, most of this is made up of recurring revenue. For operating expenses, we expect to be in a range of DKK 7.2 billion-DKK 7.8 billion. As I previously highlighted, this step up in investment is fully in line with our strategy and our focus on creating long-term value. Putting all this together, we're planning for substantial operating profit in a range of DKK 3 billion-DKK 4.8 billion.
Now for my final slide, let me provide a few closing remarks. In summary, we have a clear path to reach our 2025 vision. We've created growing recurring revenue streams, and that gives us a strong backbone of significant underlying profitability. We're investing those revenues in a highly focused way to realize our vision and to capitalize on the very significant growth opportunities in front of us. Thank you very much for your attention, and thank you again, and as always, for your continued support. Now I'd like to hand the meeting back over to Jørgen Madsen. Jørgen?
Thank you very much. That was the report by the board of directors and the presentation of the audited annual report for 2021. Here, we would normally ask shareholders if there are any questions or comments, and I've already written down one speaker on the speakers list, Klaus Werner Müller from ATP. Klaus, if you would approach the rostrum down here. I hope the technology works. Thank you for the floor. My name is Klaus Werner Müller, and I represent the pension fund ATP. Thank you for your report on the company's activities. 2021 was a good year in many ways for Genmab. Royalties increased by 47%, and you now have five products in the market, of which you are going to be marketing Tivdak yourselves.
The royalties for Darzalex were DKK 6 billion, and you now have a pipeline of six clinical products and 20 pre-clinical products. This is all very promising for Genmab. It's going to be interesting to follow the sales of Tivdak in the coming years. You're going to sell it in cooperation with Seagen in the U.S. Here, we will get the first indications of whether Genmab will have as much success with your marketed product as you've had with the early-stage clinical development of products. The coming years will be crucial as to whether we can conclude that your own sales force is a success for Genmab. In ATP, we believe that in a few years we will see a Genmab that in 25 years has evolved from a small biotech company to be a fully integrated pharmaceutical company, without your own production.
That, we must say, is success story. When it comes to the annual report, let me praise you for giving us a very informative report, telling us a lot about your technologies and pipeline projects. I also have a comment on your ESG initiatives that we've seen lately. Throughout the past couple of years, we have openly urged Genmab to make more efforts within ESG. In 2021, you have reported on your Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions, but we still need your reporting from Scope three. We still don't have targets for your reductions of greenhouse gases under Scope 1 to 3. It's good to see that you have started on ESG reporting, and we look forward to further initiatives in this respect. Genmab has more women than men. In fact, women are 58% of employees.
Previously, there were more men than women at directors level and above. In 2021, women constitute 51% of this group. That's a very positive development. I also have a few comments about the agenda. ATP will vote against your compensation report under item four. This is not due to the implementation of the report, but at a previous AGM, we have voted against your compensation policy. We will also be voting against the compensation report today. ATP voted against the compensation policy because there's a high overall salary, but the variable part is too big, and you also use warrants. We would like to see a more simple structure. Finally, let me just wish you the best of luck with your challenges for 2022. Thank you for the floor. Thank you to ATP.
There were not any specific questions in the comment, but I don't know whether you wish to respond?
Thank you, Klaus, for the very constructive remarks on the year 2021 and on the pipeline. I think we agree on that. We also agree that we need to really show that we are also going to be as good in marketing as we are in the creation and development of these novel molecules, and Tivdak will be a good case. We have a fantastic leader, Anthony Mancini, here with us, who has set up a very smart commercialization model together with Seagen in the United States. Initially, the market for Tivdak will be quite limited because it's basically second- and third-line cervical cancer patients, but we are going to broaden that market, not only in cervical cancer but also in other cancers.
As you will see very soon. Of course, immediately following Tivdak close will be Epcoritamab, which we think will be for a much bigger market together with AbbVie. We are already getting the team in place to be ready by the end of the year for launch of Epcoritamab in the United States. I think we will show you and the other investors in the coming years of successes here. Actually the initial sales momentum looks very promising for Tivdak, I can assure you. Albeit that it is a small market, but we will broaden that market as we speak. Related to the ESG initiatives, I think we are very pleased with your comments on ESG. We have stepped up considerably with ESG.
We welcome with Scope 3 reporting. I can assure you it's a process more than a journey we own as a company. We will set scientific targets also for CO2 production in the coming time. We're working with a team to do that in an appropriate manner. I can describe that to you. The company is expanding quite strongly. I mean, last year we added over 400 new colleagues. This year we'll add more colleagues. We need to be very careful with setting these targets because of course they're going to increase the footprint, the CO2 footprint.
We will come with objective targets in the coming time, and you can actually hold us to those targets, because we believe that this is incredibly important to take good care of our earth as a company, and we are very responsible there. Finally, I was most pleased with your remarks on the gender diversity. Not only do we have now more women than men, but they also are over 50% in the group of directors and higher. Actually in all of the management layers, we've actually this year promoted more women than men, actually. That will be announced pretty soon. Actually tomorrow with Chris Cozic will have a presentation in the company to announce the new promotions.
Also when everything goes well today, we actually will have a board of directors where actually there will be potentially two women. Mijke Zachariasse has already been mentioned as a employee-elected board member. A lady from the Netherlands who has been voted in by the employees last weekend actually into the board. Today when Elizabeth O'Farrell gets voted in as a director, we will have over 40% of the board of directors being composed of women. I will not stop here. I can tell you that in the company, we have not only when you look at diversity, male-female ratio, but also we have more than 56 nationalities represented in the company. We are super proud of that.
We are actually going to grow by attracting top talent all over the world, coming from different countries. We are really pleased with that. We really believe that will lead to a better international business for the company. I think all in all, we really have that as a key focus point, and that will lead to a better company going forward for sure. I refrain from commenting on the compensation remarks cause that would not be appropriate. I'm looking at Deirdre to see whether she would like to make some remarks because I have nothing to do with that, Klaus.
Thank you, Jan. Thank you for the question. I think it's important to recognize that Genmab, as it grows and evolves into this fully fully integrated biotech company, it depends on us being able to access the very best talent that is accessible to us so that we continue to grow our company. That talent increasingly is in all parts of the world. Jan just mentioned that we have 56 nations represented among our employee team, and we participate in a market, oncology, which is very active. It's growing in many parts of the world, but in the U.S. it's especially strong. Increasingly our sales, our revenues are dependent on the U.S. market. When we put our strategy, our compensation strategy together, it has to make sense.
It has to be competitive and effective, not only in Denmark, but in Europe, in the U.S., and now in Japan. We believe that the strategy that we have is the right one. We see the results of it in our board and in our talented, individuals, 1,400 strong, and we see it in the results. Thank you for the question, though.
Thank you very much. Are there any other shareholders who wish to take the floor? Are there any comments or questions? If that is not the case, I can conclude that the annual general meeting has taken note of the report and that the annual report 2021 has been adopted. As usual, we have an unqualified auditor's report in the annual report, and I also take it that we have granted discharge to the board of directors and the executive management. That is indeed the case. Thank you very much. That leads me to item three on our agenda, which is the distribution of profits. As it appears from the agenda, it is proposed that the profits for 2021, which is a profit of DKK 3.008 billion, are carried forward by transfer to retained earnings.
Are there any comments or questions for that proposal? That is not the case, then I conclude that the proposal is adopted. That leads me to item four on the agenda, which is the presentation of the compensation report. We have heard the comment from ATP. We have heard the comments from the company itself. Are there any other comments or questions regarding the compensation report as it has been presented? That is not the case, then I can conclude that it has been approved by the annual general meeting. That leads me to item five, which is the election of board members, and here I give the floor again to the Chair of the Board, Deirdre Connelly.
Each year, we evaluate the composition of the Genmab board to ensure we have the right mix of competencies for an international biotech company and consider whether changes need to be made. Each year, we also evaluate the performance and achievements of the board of directors with the assistance of an external consultant. This annual evaluation is based on questionnaires and interviews with each member of the board and the executive management team. I am pleased to say that in line with the previous years, the outcome of the board of directors' 2021 self-assessment was positive with only minor areas for improvement identified. We also continue to believe we have a very strong mix of competencies, and I'm therefore pleased to recommend re-electing all of our current AGM-elected board members.
As Jonathan Peacock stepped down from the board in 2021, I would like to thank him for his service on the board and absolutely, and subsequently am very, very pleased to present Elizabeth O'Farrell as a proposed new addition to our board. I will now run through the competencies and biographies of all the board members for election. I was elected to the board in 2017 and have been board chair since 2020. I'm standing for re-election for a one-year period. I have extensive experience in drug launches and corporate governance, both of which are increasingly important as Genmab grows. Pernille Erenbjerg was elected to the Genmab board in 2015. She has been deputy chair of the board since 2020 and is standing for re-election for a one-year period.
Pernille qualifies as an audit committee financial expert and adds valuable financial and digitization expertise to the board. Rolf Hoffmann, elected to Genmab board in 2017 and is also standing for re-election for a one-year period. Rolf's significant commercial experience is a valuable competency Genmab will need as we work towards achieving our 2025 vision. Paolo Paoletti was elected in 2015 and is also standing for re-election for a one-year period. Paolo's broad pharma and oncology experience gained during his tenures at GlaxoSmithKline and Eli Lilly and Company make him a valued member of our Genmab board. Anders Gersel Pedersen has served on Genmab's board since 2003 and standing for re-election for a one-year period as well. Anders continues to provide important insights into the biotech industry and the Danish investment community to the board.
The board also recommends electing Elizabeth O'Farrell to the board for a one-year period. Previously, she was chief procurement officer and global head of shared services at Eli Lilly. She brings with her extensive experience in corporate finance, including strategic, operational, and financial decision-making, as well as expertise in driving global change initiatives, leading cross-functional teams, and championing transformative business and culture changes. She holds a degree in accounting as well as an MBA in management information systems and has also served in roles at PricewaterhouseCoopers and Whipple & Company Corporation. In addition to the board members elected by the general meeting, we also have three employee-elected board members, Martin Schultz, Takahiro Hamatani, and Mijke Zachariasse. All three of the employee board members were elected to the board in 2022 for a three-year period.
I will now hand back over to the Chair of the meeting so he can lead the election of the Board of Directors.
Thank you very much. Those were the board's proposals for members of the board. Does anyone wish to take the floor, or are there any other candidates? That is not the case. I can then conclude that the proposal is adopted. Congratulations to the re-elected and newly elected members of the board. That leads me to item six on the agenda, which is the election of auditor, and here the board of directors proposes the re-election of PricewaterhouseCoopers. Are there any comments or questions regarding this item? That is not the case, then PricewaterhouseCoopers has been re-elected. Congratulations. Their representatives are seated up here. That leads me to item seven on our agenda, the approval of the remuneration to the board of directors for 2022, as it appears here. The proposal is that the remuneration shall remain unchanged. Are there any comments or questions under this item?
That is not the case. In that case, the proposal has been adopted. That leads me to item eight on the agenda. That is the usual proposal of authorization of the chair of the general meetings when it comes to registering any resolutions with the Danish Business Authority. Usually, that does not lead to any comments or questions, and that is the case again this year. I can conclude that has been adopted. Thank you very much. That leaves us with only one item on the agenda, which is any other business. Does anyone wish to take the floor here? This is the last chance to express your praise or criticism or make any comments or questions. If no one wants the floor, then the agenda has been exhausted. I now pass the floor back to the Chairman of the Board, Deirdre Connelly, for her final remarks.
Thank you for your participation in this meeting. I wanna take the opportunity to also thank each and every one of the employees at Genmab for the extraordinary performance. I wanna thank the management team and my colleagues on the board, and especially thank all of you for your continued support as we deliver great value to patients and, through that, great value to you. Refreshments will be served outside the room, and we look forward to meeting you during this time. Thank you and have a great day.