Pfizer CEO: 2023 will be a turning point

The COVID-19 pandemic is slowly coming to a halt. Masks are now unnecessary in most public places, transportation and municipalities. Vaccination rates have stabilized. Pfizer, along with its partner BioNTech and competitor Moderna, have saved lives with vaccines, which has also greatly increased their profits. Now - to some extent - Pfizer needs to move on.

"Next year will be a pivotal year for Pfizer," said CEO Albert Burla. "This is the year we can prove to the world and to ourselves that we can do multiple drug launches. I believe in the strength of our organization."

More than 10 new drugs are scheduled to come to market in 2023, a much larger number than usual (one or two a year). This is as the company seeks to offset declining revenues from its COVID-19 Comirnaty vaccine and Paxlovid virus remedy. Pfizer predicts that sales of these drugs will be $32 billion and $22 billion this year, respectively. That's more than half of Pfizer's revenue.

Some analysts don't think sales will meet those targets. Carter Gould of Barclays predicts $31 billion in revenues from vaccine sales and $21.5 billion from Paxlovid sales. In a recent post, he wrote that sales could fall 43% and 51%, respectively, in 2023.

Regardless of whether Pfizer reaches its sales targets in 2022, there will be a downward trend thereafter. Burla has developed a plan to restore revenues.

He said they have committed to bringing in $25 billion in risk-adjusted revenue by 2030, and they have already exceeded that target. In his view, their most important competitive advantage is our internal system, and business development will provide growth in a declining exclusivity environment.

Pfizer has been haunted by the prospect of lost revenue before. Before 2020, the biggest risk investors saw for Pfizer was the potential for a so-called patent cliff, the loss of exclusive rights to some of its blockbuster drugs. Burla, who became CEO of the company in 2019, was working on expanding a new line of pharmaceuticals when the pandemic struck.

According to Burla, the development and production process of Comirnaty showed Pfizer employees that they really can achieve seemingly insurmountable goals. He is trying to use these lessons to drive pharmaceutical development within the company and through collaborations (e.g., the successful collaboration with BioNTech). It also made a number of other acquisitions, including Biohaven for $11.6 billion; Global Blood Therapeutics for $5.4 billion; and Arena Pharmaceuticals for $6.7 billion.

Burla said he will continue on the same path of acquisition: "We want to acquire early-stage science that we can improve with our manufacturing capabilities and our clinical development capabilities."

For their part, sell-side analysts were equally divided between "buy" and "hold" assessments. Pfizer is due to report third-quarter earnings on Nov. 1.