12 November 2024
If you are covering AstraZeneca’s latest financial results, please find below a comment from Sheena Berry, healthcare analyst at Quilter Cheviot:
“AstraZeneca delivered another quarter of strong growth with product sales up 20%. This is allowing the group to continue to invest in its pipeline and product launches with increased research and development expenditure. Despite this higher expenditure, earnings are still coming in ahead of expectations, underscoring the quality of these results.
“Guidance for the full year has subsequently been raised due to strength of underlying sales growth and increased confidence of achieving a sales-based milestone by the end of the year. Unfortunately, AstraZeneca did announce that it has withdrawn a lung cancer filing and resubmitted in a different setting but 2024 remains set to be a year of high-teens growth as existing franchises continue to do well, and more to come with the full pipeline.
“China is the only slight overhang affecting the business presently. Investigations on individuals in China, including the President of the Chinese business, are ongoing. The investigations currently relate to individuals and not AstraZeneca but the uncertainty has created weakness in the share price recently. Clearly the outcome is unknown and that will concern investors, so any swift resolution will be greatly welcomed.
“But despite these overseas concerns, AstraZeneca remains on a very solid footing. Its strong, and crucially full, pipeline with a number of trial readouts and catalysts through 2025 bring an element of further growth even after this strong run. The long-term outlook remains attractive too with the group targeting $80bn in total revenue by 2030, and right now this is seeming very achievable.”
