Roche rounds off year with solid performance
pharmafile | February 3, 2012 | News story | Sales and Marketing | Roche
A strong performance in its diagnostics division was among the factors enabling Roche to deliver a solid set of results for 2011.
The group’s net profit rose to 9.34 billion Swiss francs from CHF8.67 billion a year earlier, despite sales falling from CHF47.5 billion to CHF42.5 billion.
Sales in diagnostics – an area the company is seeking to reinforce with its planned hostile takeover of US firm Illumina – rose 6% year on year at constant exchange rates to CHF9.7 billion.
Pharma sales, excluding the anti-influenza drug Tamiflu, were up 1% to CHF32.8 billion.
When it came to individual brands, sales of Rituxan and Herceptin both rose while Avastin fell – although Avastin has received EU approval to treat women with newly-diagnosed advanced ovarian cancer.
In other good news for the company, Erivedge has just been approved in the US to treat advanced basal cell carcinoma.
Currency exchange issues – reflecting the weakness of the US dollar and euro against the Swiss franc – took the shine off some of Roche’s performance, but the company remains upbeat on the prospects for its pipeline, and for the Illumina deal.
“We achieved our sales and earnings targets for the year and also made significant progress with our pipeline,” said Roche chief executive Severin Schwan.
“With 17 positive late-stage clinical trials in 2011, we continue to build our future business with innovative products,” he added.
“Furthermore the planned acquisition of Illumina will strengthen our presence in the fast-growing sequencing market and enable the discovery of complex biomarkers for research and clinical use,” Schwan concluded.
For this year Roche suggests group sales will grow at a “low to mid-single-digit rate” with ‘high single-digit’ growth in core earnings per share.
Analyst Jefferies & Company said the earnings prediction was on the conservative side, and said it expected this figure to rise during the year.
It was “overall, a solid set of numbers”, Jefferies commented.
Adam Hill
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