Significantly lower sales and profits, far fewer vaccine doses sold. In return, the company is spending more on research and development and has high hopes for cancer therapies.
The vaccine manufacturer Biontech wants to bring its first cancer drug onto the market in 2026. The Mainz company is aiming for approvals in ten indications by 2030. Company boss Ugur Sahin announced this when presenting the business figures for the full year 2023. In oncology, several partnerships have been formed and numerous clinical advances have been made.
In the 2023 financial year, which ended on December 31, there was a net profit of 930.3 million euros. This was significantly less than the 9.4 billion in the previous year, mainly due to the shrinking Covid-19 vaccine business.
The biotechnology company’s sales were 3.8 billion euros in 2023 after 17.3 billion in the previous year. Biontech referred, among other things, to write-downs on vaccine stocks by its US partner Pfizer. For the current year 2024, the Mainz company expects sales of between 2.5 and 3.1 billion euros.
In total, Biontech and Pfizer delivered more than 400 million Covid-19 vaccine doses worldwide in the 2023 financial year. In comparison, around 2 billion cans were billed in 2022, and in 2021 there were even 2.6 billion.
Research and development costs went up. According to its own information, Biontech spent a total of around 1.8 billion euros on this in 2023, compared to 1.5 billion in the previous year. In 2024, things are expected to continue to rise, when Biontech plans to spend between 2.4 and 2.6 billion euros on research and development.
Source: Stern
