Roche remains on course for growth – negative factors diminish
Published: Wednesday, Oct 23rd 2024, 12:00
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Roche remains on its growth path after nine months. The Basel-based company therefore believes it is well on track to achieve its targets for the year as a whole.
The pharmaceutical company is gradually managing to put the difficult years behind it, when copycat products and the loss of Covid-19 sales overshadowed growth. The coronavirus consequences last left a clear mark in the first quarter of 2024, said Group CEO Thomas Schinecker in an interview with analysts on Wednesday after the presentation of the nine-month figures. "They were barely visible in the second and third quarters."
According to the CEO, Roche has also survived the worst of the sales erosion caused by biosimilars. The situation is now stabilizing. As a reminder: copycat products for the long-standing blockbusters Avastin, Herceptin and Mabthera have cost the Group billions in sales in recent years.
On track after 9 months
Thanks to new registrations, however, these effects are now more than offset. This was confirmed by the figures presented on Wednesday. In the first nine months, the pharmaceutical company generated sales of almost 45 billion Swiss francs. This is an increase of 2 percent compared to the previous year. At constant exchange rates, sales even increased by 6 percent. According to a press release, Roche benefited from high demand for both its medicines and diagnostics.
The larger pharma division contributed sales of 34.3 billion francs. This is 3 percent more than a year ago.
The development was driven by good demand for medicines such as the eye drug Vabysmo, Phesgo (breast cancer), Ocrevus (multiple sclerosis), Hemlibra (haemophilia) and Polivy (blood cancer). Together, these five drugs achieved sales of 13.2 billion, which corresponds to an increase of 2.7 billion at constant exchange rates compared to the same period of the previous year, the statement continued.
With sales of 10.7 billion, the Diagnostics division kept its revenue stable. It had suffered even more from the loss of coronavirus sales. Corona tests had given the division a real boost.
Roche traditionally does not publish profit figures after nine months.
Focus on beacons of hope
CEO Schinecker has confirmed the previous forecast for the year as a whole, according to which the Group should continue to grow. Profit is expected to increase slightly more than turnover. The manager also expects further growth after 2024.
After all, Roche has streamlined its pipeline over the past year and a half in order to focus primarily on the most promising projects. These include the slimming agents that the Group acquired last year as part of a takeover. "We are pressing ahead with the projects at full speed," Schinecker confirms earlier statements.
In order to avoid getting bogged down with less successful projects in the future, Roche recently announced at the Investors' Day in September that projects would be measured against clearly defined criteria. This should help to ensure that Roche does not waste money on less promising projects, thereby increasing the success rate and thus also the business figures, Schinecker emphasized.
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