Pfizer beats 3Q net forecasts on lower charges, higher sales

FAN Editor

Pfizer doubled its third-quarter profit, on a combination of slightly higher sales, lower one-time charges and reduced spending on production and administration. The drug giant edged past Wall Street’s profit expectations and improved its 2017 financial forecast.

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The maker of Viagra and pain treatment Lyrica on Tuesday said it will decide next year whether to sell or spin off its consumer health business, which sells products including Chapstick, Centrum vitamins and Advil pain reliever. Pfizer said earlier this month that it is considering whether to keep or divest the business.

The New York company has been down this road before, having previously decided consumer health wasn’t a good fit. It sold a sizeable stable of consumer products to rival Johnson & Johnson in December 2006 for $16.6 billion. Just three years later, Pfizer ended up back in the consumer business as a result of its mega-acquisition of drugmaker Wyeth in 2009.

In the latest period, Pfizer Inc. reported third-quarter profit of $2.84 billion, or 47 cents per share. That’s up from $1.36 billion, or 22 cents per share, in 2016’s third quarter.

Excluding one-time items, net income came to $4.06 billion, or 67 cents per share. That was two cents more than analysts expected, according to a survey by Zacks Investment Research.

The drugmaker boosted revenue 1 percent to $13.17 billion, which met forecasts.

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Pfizer posted higher sales for most of its key new drugs, including cancer drugs Ibrance and Xtandi, Xeljanz for rheumatoid arthritis and Eliquis for preventing strokes and blood clots. Top seller Prevnar, a vaccine against ear, bloodstream and other pneumococcal infections, saw sales dip 1 percent to $1.52 billion, but overall the company’s key segment selling newer, patent-protected medicines posted an 11 percent increase in revenue, to $8.12 billion.

Sales of older drugs facing generic competition in various countries fell 12 percent to $5.05 billion.

Consumer health sales rose 4 percent to $829 million.

Pfizer said it now expects full-year earnings in the range of $2.58 to $2.62 per share, a slightly higher and narrower range than its August forecast for $2.54 to $2.60 per share. It expects revenue in the range of $52.4 billion to $53.1 billion, versus $52 billion to $54 billion in its prior forecast.

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Follow Linda A. Johnson at https://twitter.com/LindaJ_onPharma

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Elements of this story wer generated by Automated Insights using data from Zacks Investment Research.

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