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Roche sees Q3 sales rise

pharmafile | October 16, 2012 | News story | Sales and Marketing Roche, financials 

Roche’s sales for January to September this year were up 4% on the same nine-month period in 2011, with oncology and its clinical laboratory business driving growth.

The Basel-based pharma group posted sales of 33.7 billion Swiss francs, with a 9% rise in its oncology portfolio, and says the performance of recently-launched cancer medicines Zelboraf, Erivedge and Perjeta has been ‘positive’.

The three top-selling brands from January to September were MabThera/Rituxan (sales rose 10% to 5 billion Swiss francs), Herceptin (up 12% to 4.4 billion Swiss francs) and Avastin (+6% to 4.3 billion Swiss francs).

Together this trio made up more than half of all pharma sales, which rose 4% to 26.2 billion Swiss francs. The company insisted it was on track to meet the full-year target of low to mid-single-digit sales growth and said its pipeline was showing great promise.

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“Our pipeline has continued to deliver with 11 positive results out of 14 late-stage studies so far this year,” said Roche chief executive Severin Schwan.

The HER2 franchise has been boosted by the launch of breast cancer drug Perjeta in the US and Switzerland, as well as the filing of antibody-drug conjugate T-DM1 in both the US and Europe.

Although group sales in Western Europe fell by 2%, the US and emerging markets – particularly China, which was up 26%, and Brazil (+13%) – performed strongly.

Revenue in Roche’s diagnostics division was up 4% to 7.5 billion Swiss francs, with growth driven by clinical labs, particularly professional diagnostics (+9%) and tissue diagnostics (+15 per cent).

It has not been all plain sailing: diabetes care and applied science businesses both dipped 5% due to ‘challenging’ markets.

Adam Hill

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