Pfizer Lifts FY Outlook on Strong Omicron Booster Sales

Supply: Predictions primarily based on analysts’ consensus from Seen Alpha

Pfizer Monetary Outcomes: Evaluation

Pfizer Inc. (PFE) handily beat analysts’ earnings expectations early on Nov. 1, 2022, and lifted the gross sales forecast for its COVID-19 vaccine, sending shares 2.8% larger by noon Tuesday.

The main U.S. drugmaker posted adjusted earnings of $1.78 per share for Q3 FY 2022, up from EPS of $1.27 a yr earlier and forward of market expectations for $1.39. Income fell 6% year-over-year to $22.6 billion in opposition to unusually robust gross sales within the year-ago quarter, however nonetheless topped estimates.

Pfizer raised its 2022 gross sales forecast for the Comirnaty COVID-19 vaccine to $34 billion from $32 billion. It maintained steering for $22 billion in annual income from the Paxlovid antiviral remedy. Comirnaty and Paxlovid accounted for about 57% of the corporate’s income over the primary 9 months of FY 2022.

Pfizer raised its FY 2022 adjusted EPS forecast to a spread of $6.40 to six.50, from $6.30 to $6.45 beforehand.

U.S. COVID-19 vaccine gross sales soared 83% from a yr earlier, pushed by the deliveries of the Omicron-adapted bivalent booster photographs following an emergency use authorization from the Meals and Drug Administration in late August. Paxlovid, a extremely efficient COVID-19 retroviral remedy approved for emergency use in late 2021, was Pfizer’s bestselling drug with quarterly income of $7.5 billion.

Pfizer’s Product Pipeline and Patent Cliffs

The corporate mentioned it anticipated to launch 19 merchandise or indications over the following 18 months, a part of an effort to organize for the patent cliff, or the scheduled expiration in coming years of selling exclusivity for prime medication together with the pneumonia vaccine Prevnar 13, anticoagulant Eliquis, and prostate most cancers remedy Xtandi.

“We acknowledge that some are questioning Pfizer’s longer-term progress prospects⁠—notably within the 2025-2030 timeframe,” mentioned CEO Albert Bourla on the earnings name. “That’s comprehensible on condition that we at the moment anticipate a destructive affect of roughly $17 billion in revenues from losses of exclusivity throughout that interval. We consider we not solely can overcome these anticipated declines, but in addition can doubtlessly generate robust progress by means of the top of the last decade.”

Towards that finish, the corporate in October 2022 accomplished acquisitions of migraine therapies developer Biohaven for $12.8 billion and World Blood Therapeutics, a biotechnology firm specializing in therapies for sickle cell illness, for $5.6 billion.

Pfizer additionally introduced Nov. 1 {that a} late-stage trial of its maternal vaccine designed to guard newborns in opposition to the Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) confirmed efficacy of almost 82% in opposition to extreme medically attended decrease respiratory tract sickness because of RSV in infants by means of the primary three months after delivery, and 69% efficacy over six months.