In the past few days, drugmakers have publicly disclosed how they expect sales of COVID-19 vaccines and other related products to fare during the last quarter of 2023.
Over the weekend, Pfizer reduced its full-year guidance for its vaccine Comirnaty revenues by $2 billion.
The pharma giant also amended its oral COVID treatment Paxlovid supply agreement with the federal government, which will return 7.9 million treatment courses with emergency use authorization labels.
The company slashed the guidance for revenues of Paxlovid by $7 billion. This includes a $4.2 billion non-cash revenue reversal for the return of the nearly 8 million treatment courses from the U.S. government inventory.
Going forward, Pfizer said it would commercialize Paxlovid for the treatment of patients with private health insurance, with prices negotiated by payers.
Additionally, Pfizer recorded a $5.5 billion non-cash charge during Q3 for COVID inventory write-offs due to lower-than-expected demand, reaffirmed its full-year, non-COVID product operational revenue growth projections of 6% to 8% and launched an enterprise-wide cost realignment program set to result in at least $3.5 billion of savings. $1 billion in savings is expected this year along with at least $2.5 billion expected next year.
Pfizer revised its 2023 adjusted diluted earnings per share guidance to $1.45 to account for lower expected revenues for COVID products and the inventory write-offs.
Pfizer is slated to publish its latest quarterly earnings report on the morning of October 31.
The disclosures come weeks after Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax got approval for their respective updated COVID shots for the fall vaccination season.
In response to Pfizer’s filings, its collaborative partner on the COVID vaccine, BioNTech, said the inventory write-offs do not address the updated booster shot and that it is still evaluating the impact of these charges.
As such, BioNTech said it expects to recognize the effect of Pfizer’s inventory write-offs related to Comirnaty in Q3 up to €0.9 billion, which represents BioNTech’s half under the gross profit-sharing agreement.
Over the summer, BioNTech released its Q2 earnings report and indicated that like many other drugmakers, it was dealing with a significant revenue drop due to waning demand for COVID vaccines and treatments.
The German biotech reported €167.7 million in total revenues for the quarter, down from €3.2 billion during the same period in 2022. At the time, BioNTech reiterated its full-year COVID-19 vaccine revenue guidance of about €5 billion.
BioNTech is slated to publish its latest quarterly earnings report on the morning of November 6.
Meanwhile, Moderna released a statement on Monday saying it remains comfortable with the guide range of $6 billion to $8 billion for its full-year anticipated revenues from the sale of its COVID vaccine Spikevax.
The company added that it is still too early in the vaccination season to accurately project where U.S. vaccination rates will be for 2023 but anticipates improved visibility after seeing the monthly trends through October.
Moderna is slated to publish its latest quarterly earnings report on the morning of November 2.
For a December 2023 report on Pfizer’s updated outlook for 2024, click here.
