AbbVie financials beat expectations
pharmafile | October 31, 2014 | News story | Sales and Marketing | AbbVie, Abbott, Creon, Humira, Iopinavir/ritonavir, Kaletra, Q3, Synthroid, levothyroxine, pancrelipase
AbbVie has announced higher-than-expected financial results for the third quarter of 2014, although it continues to rely heavily on blockbuster drug Humira that is soon to face patent expiry.
The US drugmaker that spun off of Abbott Laboratories last year brought in third quarter revenues of $5 billion, a growth of almost 8% from the same period in 2013 – and well above Wall Street estimates.
As a result AbbVie has raised its earnings-per-share guidance for the end of 2014 to between $3.25 and $3.27, up from between $3.06 and $3.16 per share.
Several of the company’s key products saw strong sales growth, including: Kaletra (Iopinavir/ritonavir), up 8.4% to $256 million; Synthroid (levothyroxine), up 24.3% to $200 million; and Creon (pancrelipase), up 47.6% to $148 million.
The figures continue to be driven mainly by its Crohn’s Disease treatment Humira (adalimumab), however. Humira is the world’s biggest-selling drug and grew by almost 18% to $3.3 billion in the third quarter, far eclipsing the company’s other products.
This could be worrying for AbbVie as US patents for Humira are set to expire in 2016, and the company has yet to find an equally impressive replacement to date despite investigating several other potential revenue paths.
The company does say it expects US approval of its hepatitis C combination treatment to arrive in 2014, and positive results were also announced for the company’s investigational non-small cell lung cancer compound veliparib in the third quarter.
AbbVie recently partnered with Google’s Calico to develop medicines for age-related diseases, and with Infinity Pharmaceuticals to develop and commercialise the latter company’s promising blood cancer treatment duvelisib.
These latest Q3 results do not take into account the recent termination of AbbVie’s proposed $55 billion acquisition of Shire, after US law changes removed the potential for AbbVie to dramatically reduce its tax rates by locating the combined company in the UK.
It has said that it will pay a $1.64 billion break fee as a result of the deal’s cancellation.
George Underwood
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