Roche revenue drops as key products underperform
pharmafile | October 13, 2011 | News story | Sales and Marketing | Roche
Roche has posted worse-than-expected figures for the first nine months of this year after key products failed to shine and falling sales of Tamiflu dragged down results across the group.
Influenza drug Tamiflu brought Roche windfall sales in 2009 in the wake of the swine flu epidemic, but the drug’s revenue dropped off sharply in the first nine months of 2010 and this pattern has been repeated this year.
Group sales for the first nine month of 2011 were flat at CHF 31 billion ($35bn) in constant exchange rates and pharma revenues were down 1% to CHF 24.4bn ($27.2bn).
Stripping out the effect of Tamiflu’s falling sales and the picture was slightly better for Roche, with group sales up 2% and pharma sales up 1%, but the company was also hit by problems with a number of its other products.
The biggest of these came from cancer drug Avastin (bevacizumab), which saw sales decrease by 8% in constant exchange rates after the FDA pulled the drug’s breast cancer licence earlier this year and the EMA restricted its use for this indication after new trials failed to prove its efficacy.
Sales of bone drug Boniva were also down by 19% to CHF 550 million, after poor uptake in the US.
Roche biggest growth driver came from its wet AMD eye drug Lucentis (ranibizumab), which saw an increase of 26% to CHF 1.18bn.
But Lucentis, which Roche co-markets with fellow Swiss firm Novartis, could come under significant pricing pressure in the US next year as the government looks to allow off-label use of the much cheaper Avastin for wet AMD instead of Lucentis.
Herceptin also managed steady sales of CHF 3.9bn, an increase of 8% compared to this time last year.
Roche chief executive Severin Schwan said that despite the problems with Avastin, the firm was still on track to achieve its targets for 2011.
He pointed to the successful US launch of its new melanoma drug Zelboraf and its in-house diagnostic test for the treatment, which he said has “strengthened our leading position in personalised healthcare”.
He added: “The good results we have achieved with new medicines in seven late-stage clinical trials so far this year further enhance our prospects for future growth.”
Karl Heinz Koch, a Zurich-based analyst for Helvea SA, was less optimistic about the results, and told Bloomberg: “The key drugs really underperformed”, adding that even taking into account the strength of the franc, “these are not very encouraging numbers”.
Ben Adams
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