Roche revenue depressed by plummeting Tamiflu sales
pharmafile | October 15, 2010 | News story | Sales and Marketing | 2010 financials, Q3, Roche
Roche suffered a 3% drop in group revenue in the third quarter as sales of its Tamiflu plummeted by 90 percent.
The flu treatment’s sales drop was expected after its performance was artificially buoyed by the H1N1 flu virus but it nonetheless depressed group sales and Roche’s pharmaceutical sales in particular.
These fell by 5% in the quarter to CHF 9 billion and the company’s sales performance in Japan suffered the most with a 22% drop over the same period in 2009.
Looking at the broader picture of the first nine months of 2010, pharma sales were down 2% on the previous year to CHF 28.4 billion ($29.73 billion).
Excluding Tamiflu sales Roche’s pharmaceuticals division managed 2% growth in the year to date, climbing to CHF 27.6 billion.
The Roche Group as a whole remained almost flat at CHF 36.13 billion, down 1% from CHF 36.40 billion in 2009.
Roche chief executive Severin Schwan said: ‘The Roche Group recorded solid nine-month sales growth in a challenging market.
“I am also pleased that several of our pharma development projects reported positive data in the third quarter, notably MetMAb in lung cancer and T-DM1 in HER2-positive breast cancer.”
Sales of Roche’s blockbuster cancer drug Avastin grew by 11% to CHF 5.0 billion in the first nine months of 2010, but it has had its problems.
The FDA is currently mulling over an advisory committee’s decision to pull Avastin’s breast cancer indication after phase IV studies showed it lacked efficacy, potentially wiping a fifth from its overall sales.
The UK drugs watchdog NICE is still recommending that the drug not be paid for by the NHS in England, blocking off another key market for the drug.
Carri Duncan, an analyst at Macquarie Group in Zurich, told Bloomberg: “Avastin’s not looking good.
“We’ve seen sequentially that growth in Avastin sales is coming down and I don’t see how it’s going to get better.”
Herceptin, for HER2+ breast cancer, kept up a healthy 8% growth for the first nine months, reaching CHF 4.16 billion.
Lucentis, indicated for wet age-related macular degeneration, enjoyed the strongest growth, up 29% to CHF 1.08 billion.
Pegasys, for hepatitis B and C, remained flat at CHF 1.3 billion and organ transplant treatment CellCept continued to slide under generic pressures, with sales decreasing by 23% to CHF 702 million.
The company expects to make swingeing job cuts next year as unveiled in its Operational Excellence initiative last month, with details on the numbers affected due by the end of the year.
Ben Adams
Related Content
Roche receives CE Mark for blood test to help rule out Alzheimer’s
Roche has been granted CE Mark approval for its Elecsys pTau181 test, the first in …
Roche candidate shows early promise for treating haemophilia A
Roche has announced encouraging early results from its phase 1/2 trial of NXT007, an investigational …
Roche advances treatment for Parkinson’s disease
Swiss biopharma, Roche, has announced its decision to proceed with phase 3 trials of prasinezumab, …
