Boehringer posts strong financials

pharmafile | August 16, 2012 | News story | Sales and Marketing |  AMNOG, Boehringer, COPD, Spiriva 

Boehringer Ingelheim has seen steady growth in the first half of 2012, but warns that the next six months may not be so fruitful.

The privately owned German firm saw sales grow by 6.8%, up to €7.1 billion for the first half of the year.

The majority of this revenue came from prescription drugs, which saw €5.6 billion in sales, an increase of nearly 9% on last year.

Its biggest selling drug remains the COPD treatment Spiriva, which it co-markets with Pfizer, that made €1.8 billion. Its oral anticoagulant Pradaxa saw sales of €500 million as it continues its march toward reaching blockbuster status.

But the drug has come under scrutiny from the EMA this year after high rates of bleeding were seen in trials; the regulator, however, has kept the drug on the market, but has asked doctors to be vigilant about Pradaxa’s risks.

“For Boehringer Ingelheim, sales in the first half of the 2012 financial year were shaped by the market launch of Pradaxa and the positive development of our established drugs”, said Hubertus von Baumbach, member of the board responsible for finance.

But he warned that sustaining the growth seen in the first half of 2012 over the next six months ‘will be challenging’.

This was echoed by Professor Andreas Barner, chairman of the board, who said the positive figures “are snapshots in time and must not obscure our view of the changes taking place in our most important markets.

“The economic headwind from the sovereign debt crisis in southern Europe and the continued weak economic growth in the US make the business environment increasingly difficult for the pharmaceutical industry,” he said.

Barner takes aim at AMNOG

In addition to this, he said it is also becoming ‘increasingly difficult’ to access markets and establish new treatments such as Pradaxa and its new diabetes treatment Trajenta, which is co-marketed with Lilly.

In a warning to governments, he concluded: “Moreover, the economic and financial crisis has left some countries wondering whether they can introduce new medications under their reduced healthcare and national budgets, even if these medications are clearly superior to standard treatments”.

This will be aimed primarily at the company’s native Germany, which last year introduced a new HTA system called AMNOG.

The system works much like a combination of Value-Based Pricing and NICE, where the government will assess a drug’s worth and value, and decide what it will pay after a series of negotiations.

Boehringer and Lilly said last year that they wouldn’t launch Trajenta in Germany, even though it is Europe’s largest pharma market, because it didn’t believe that the AMNOG system would justly reward the drug for what it does.

This has since led to the European pharma lobby group EFPIA to speak out, saying that Germany’s ‘punitive measures’ should end, or risk not having new and innovative medicines.

Ben Adams