SWISS drugmaker Novartis reported first-quarter core operating profit and sales below market expectations on Tuesday, as generic competition for its top-selling heart drug Entresto weighed on results.<\/p>\n
Shares of the drugmaker declined 3 percent in premarket trading on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Quarterly group operating income, adjusted for special items, declined 12 percent 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 up 14 percent of its total net sales last year.<\/p>\n
CFO Mukul Mehta said on a call with reporters that the results were in line with the company’s internal expectations.<\/p>\n
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By signing up with an email address, I acknowledge that I have read and agree to the Terms of Service<\/a> and Privacy Policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n “We do expect growth to return back to our P&L in second half of this year,” he said.<\/p>\n Entresto saw first-quarter sales drop 42 percent to $1.31 billion after its US patents expired and competing 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 the pressure on Novartis to deliver sales growth from newer drugs.<\/p>\n Total net sales for the quarter came in at $13.11 billion, compared with analysts’ expectations of $13.40 billion.<\/p>\n The Swiss group has said it expects its sales to decline by $4 billion this year due to competition from generics for Entresto and the other two drugs.<\/p>\n The Basel-based company also confirmed its full-year forecast of a low single-digit percentage core operating income drop, excluding currency swings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SWISS drugmaker Novartis reported first-quarter core operating profit and sales below market expectations on Tuesday, as generic competition…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29944,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[127],"tags":[12793,3713,31856,16893,626,31857,31854,206,1933,31855,3743],"class_list":{"0":"post-57148","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-novartis","8":"tag-as","9":"tag-entresto","10":"tag-estimates","11":"tag-generics","12":"tag-growth","13":"tag-hit","14":"tag-misses","15":"tag-novartis","16":"tag-profit","17":"tag-quarterly","18":"tag-sales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116483308070091100","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57148","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=57148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57148\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}