Plavix boosts BMS first quarter figures
pharmafile | April 30, 2010 | News story | Sales and Marketing | BMS, Plavix
Plavix has boosted Bristol-Myers Squibb’s performance in the first quarter of the year, with sales of the anti-clotting blockbuster up 16% to $1.7 billion.
The company posted overall net sales of $4.8bn ($3.1bn of which were in the US), a year-on-year increase of 11% – or 8% excluding the impact of foreign exchange.
The company’s virology franchise also performed strongly, including hepatitis B drug Baraclude (up 42% to $216 million).
Sales of HIV treatments Reyataz and Sustiva also showed healthy, by 16% year-on-year to $373 million and 15% to $335 million, respectively.
In oncology, Erbitux was more or less static at $166 million sales but Sprycel rose 49% to $131m.
“Double-digit growth for both sales and earnings per share marks a very positive start to the year for our company,” said the company’s chief executive designate Lamberto Andreotti.
“While we remain clearly committed to productivity, we are also focused on giving maximum priority to driving sales growth.”
BMS faces “the challenges of an increasingly complex business environment, now including US health care reform”, he added.
The company says Barack Obama’s reform of the system had a 1% negative effect on net sales in the first quarter.
It bases these calculations on factors such as having to pay higher rebates to Medicaid – and BMS warned there would be more bad financial news as other parts of the law are implemented, such as discounts to hospitals.
Next year, the manufacturer will give a 50% discount on its branded drugs to patients who fall within the Medicare Part D coverage gap – the so-called “doughnut hole” of coverage.
A positive impact on net sales from the reforms – through an expected increase in the number of people with health insurance – will not happen until at least 2014, BMS says.
But Andreotti was keen to emphasise the importance of BMS’s pipeline: in the coming months the company expects to present phase III findings on ipilimumab in metastatic melanoma and Sprycel for the first-line treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia.
It will also make public the results of a phase III study of dapagliflozin for the treatment of type II diabetes and new data for belatacept.
In March, the US Food and Drug Administration recommended approval of belatacept, a selective co-stimulation blocker, for the prophylaxis of acute rejection in de novo kidney transplant patients, and a final decision is expected in May.
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