Image: BARBARA GINDL (APA)
After the US partner Pfizer announced a drastic reduction in its sales and profit targets as well as billions in depreciation a few days ago, Biontech is also examining the effects on its business.
The German biotech company is threatened with high write-offs of up to 900 million euros in the third quarter. “We are currently in the midst of Covid fatigue, where everyone wants to forget about the disease,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said on Monday.
BioNTech did not want to comment on its annual forecast, which so far foresees sales of around five (2022: 17.3) billion euros for Covid vaccines in 2023 – in the first half of the year it was only 1.4 billion. But the company has been expecting seasonal demand for vaccinations for a long time, which is why Biontech had forecast the corresponding sales for the second half of the year. According to the company, the threatened write-downs correspond to half of the gross profit share from the agreement with Pfizer. “Any such write-downs will reduce the revenue the company would report for 2023.”
Stocks under pressure
The new vaccine from Biontech and Pfizer, adapted to the Omicron sub-variant XBB.1.5, has been available for vaccinations for around a month. Pfizer boss Bourla assumes that around 17 percent of the US population will be vaccinated with the updated booster during the current campaign. Although this corresponds to the level of the previous year, it is far below the rates achieved when the vaccines were widely introduced in spring 2021. This brought manufacturers billions in sales during the pandemic.
The poor outlook put Biontech shares under pressure at the beginning of the week. The shares fell by up to eleven percent on the Frankfurt stock exchange. Its competitor Moderna lost almost three percent on Wall Street, although the US biotech company reiterated sales expectations for its Covid vaccine. Although Pfizer was able to grow, it has already fallen by around 37 percent this year.
The abrupt end of the coronaThe boom was already noticeable among vaccine manufacturers in the second quarter. Biontech therefore posted a net loss of a good 190 million euros after a profit of 1.67 billion a year ago and already in August referred to write-offs by its partner Pfizer on stocks of the Covid vaccine Comirnaty that had expired or were about to expire To exceed. Biontech plans to publish the figures for the third quarter on November 6th.
Pfizer massively lowered its annual targets on Friday because business with its Covid-19 drug Paxlovid and the Comirnaty vaccine developed together with Biontech ended at the end of the year corona-Pandemic is weaker than expected. The depreciation and charges in the third quarter therefore amount to a total of 5.5 billion dollars (5.2 billion euros), of which 4.6 billion are attributable to Paxlovid and the rest to Comirnaty. According to Pfizer, the write-downs do not concern doses of the newly updated vaccine, but mainly raw materials such as lipids for the vaccine formulation that were purchased during the pandemic, as well as doses that were adapted to variants other than XBB.1.5.
For 2023, Pfizer now expects sales of 58 to 61 billion dollars instead of 67 to 70 billion dollars and earnings per share of 1.45 to 1.65 (previously: 3.25 to 3.45) dollars. The US government is returning emergency stocks of around 7.9 million Paxlovid treatment units to Pfizer, resulting in a loss of $4.2 billion in sales for the company. Pfizer lowered its sales expectations for Paxlovid for this year by a total of around seven billion dollars and those for Comirnaty by around two billion – due to lower than expected vaccination rates. Last year, Pfizer brought in more than $56 billion in sales with both products.
The group announced a cost-cutting program that is expected to save at least $3.5 billion annually by the end of 2024. Job cuts are also expected to contribute to this, although Pfizer left it open as to how many jobs would be cut in which areas.
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