Roche sees slow sales amid market pressures
pharmafile | July 22, 2010 | News story | Sales and Marketing | 2010 financials, Q2, Roche
Roche has posted average first half year results with pharma sales that showed only low single digit growth.
They showed a 4% increase in local currencies but only rose 1% in Swiss Francs, with sales of Tamiflu falling under target, down 31% to CHF 710 million.
The company acknowledged it had been negatively affected by the US health reform programme and the European ‘austerity measures’ that have seen a number of EU countries cutting their drug prices.
Chief executive Severin Schwan said: “Roche achieved a strong operating performance in the first half of 2010 despite an increasingly challenging market environment; net income for the period was up significantly.
“Excluding Tamiflu, pharma sales increased faster than the market, and diagnostics continued to grow significantly above the market rate. The US filing of T-DM1, an ‘armed antibody’ for the treatment of HER-2 positive breast cancer, represents a major step towards offering this innovative medicine to patients who have very limited treatment options.”
Multi-indicated oncology drug Avastin achieved a strong 14% rise to remain Roche’s biggest seller at CHF 3.9 billion.
But this consistency in growth may slow in the second half of this year. One day before posting its results the FDA’s oncology advisors voted 12 to one that Avastin should not keep its breast cancer indication after follow-up studies failed to show a viable risk-benefit profile.
A final decision is expected on 17 September, which could see the blockbuster drug lose up to $1 billion a year, according to analysts.
Roche’s other top selling oncology drugs: MabThera for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Herceptin for HER2-postive breast cancer and Xeloda for breast and colon cancer all grew strongly at 9%, 8% and 19% respectively, and helped buoy overall growth.
Organ transplant treatment CellCept continued to slide under generic pressures, with sales decreasing by 23% to CHF 702 million.
Roche said it is keeping its 2010 outlook unchanged despite recording lower-than-expected earnings.
Ben Adams
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