April 28 (Reuters) – Swiss drugmaker Novartis reported first-quarter core operating profit and sales below market expectations on Tuesday, as generic \u200ccompetition for its top-selling heart drug Entresto weighed on \u200cresults.<\/p>\n
Shares of the drugmaker declined 3% in premarket trading on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Quarterly group operating income, \u200badjusted for special items, declined 12% to $4.9 billion, below average analyst expectations of about $5.1 billion cited by Visible Alpha.<\/p>\n
Novartis is navigating its largest patent expiry in the last two decades, including for Entresto, which made \u200cup 14% of its \u2060total net sales last year.<\/p>\n
CFO Mukul Mehta said on a call with reporters that the results were in \u2060line with the company’s internal expectations.<\/p>\n
“We do expect growth to return back to our P&L in second half of this year,” he said.<\/p>\n
Entresto \u200bsaw first-quarter \u200bsales drop 42% to $1.31 billion after \u200bits U.S. patents expired and \u200ccompeting generics were launched. Entresto faces patent expiries in Europe starting November.<\/p>\n
Analysts were expecting sales of $1.37 billion for the first quarter ended March 31, according to data compiled by Visible Alpha.<\/p>\n
Blood disorder drug Promacta and leukemia treatment Tasigna also face competition from generics, increasing \u200cthe pressure on Novartis to deliver \u200bsales growth from newer drugs.<\/p>\n
Total net sales \u200bfor the quarter came \u200bin at $13.11 billion, compared with analysts’ expectations of $13.40 billion.<\/p>\n
The \u200cSwiss group has said it expects \u200bits sales to \u200bdecline by $4 billion this year due to competition from generics for Entresto and the other two drugs. The Basel-based company \u200balso confirmed its full-year \u200cforecast of a low single-digit percentage core operating income drop, \u200bexcluding currency swings.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Marleen Kaesebier and Bhanvi SatijaEditing \u200bby Ludwig Burger and Louise Heavens)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"April 28 (Reuters) – Swiss drugmaker Novartis reported first-quarter core operating profit and sales below market expectations on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":56954,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[127],"tags":[31786,3713,838,31787,206,7136,2048,31785],"class_list":{"0":"post-56953","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-novartis","8":"tag-analyst-expectations","9":"tag-entresto","10":"tag-market-expectations","11":"tag-net-sales","12":"tag-novartis","13":"tag-operating-profit","14":"tag-sales-growth","15":"tag-visible-alpha"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116482246367342914","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56953"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56953\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}