BioNTech Provisions €900 Million Due to the Slowdown in Sales of the COVID-19 Vaccine

BioNTech announced today that it has made a provision of €900 million as a result of the deterioration of its inventory because the demand for the COVID-19 vaccine made in alliance with Pfizer is lower than initially expected.

Through a statement, BioNTech has indicated that “Pfizer has reported that the majority of cancellations refer to raw materials, mainly lipids related to the formulation, acquired during the pandemic, as well as adapted doses of the Covid-19 vaccine to other variants.”

The German biotechnology company is currently analyzing the impact of Pfizer’s cancellations, which will appear in the results for the third quarter of 2023, which will be announced next November.

BioNTech’s announcement comes after Pfizer has reduced its forecasts for the COVID-19 vaccine (Comirnaty) and its antiviral (Paxlovid) due to low demand. Moderna, Pfizer, and BioNTech have aroused investor distrust in recent months due to the difficult prediction of demand for doses of Covid-19 vaccines.

BioNTech closed last year with a profit of €9.43 billion, which translated into a decrease of 8.3% compared to 2021, due to a drop in sales of the COVID-19 vaccine during the period.

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Besides BioNTech, Pfizer has also lowered billing forecasts by more than $4 billion due to new demand for vaccines 

BioNTech ‘s turnover in 2022 was €17.31 billion, which represented a decrease of 8.8%. By business segments, those from the marketing of medicines amounted to €17.2 billion, while the research and development (R&D) division contributed €116 million.

As for Pfizer, the American pharmaceutical company closed the second quarter of the year with an attributable net profit of $2.32 billion, 77% less than in the same period of 2022. The company is facing a drop in demand for products for COVID-19, both for the vaccine and the antiviral Paxlovid.

The company reported that it expected sales of these products to continue falling during the last quarter of the year. To solve the drop in sales of COVID-19 products, it has been drugs from companies recently acquired by Pfizer (such as Biohaven Pharmaceuticals ‘ anti-migraine medication or Global Blood Therapeutics ‘ anemia treatment ) that have balanced the bottom line.

This circumstance is affecting the entire sector. In September, Moderna announced that it would reduce the production of coronavirus vaccines to adapt to lower demand and be able to achieve the expected gross margin growth, a goal that involved taking it from 75% to 80%. As a consequence of this situation, the American biotechnology company recorded losses of 1,301 million dollars in the first half of the year, compared to the profits of $5.85 billion reported in the same period a year ago.

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First published in PlantaDoce. A third-party contributor translated and adapted the article from the original. In case of discrepancy, the original will prevail.

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