Early this year, Pfizer told investors it expected to sell $21.5 billion worth of its Covid-19 products in 2023. No one believed it.
While questions remain about how the Covid-19 products will perform next year, and in the years that follow, Pfizer’s acknowledgment of what many investors had already expected is good news for the stock. It could clear the way for Pfizer to get credit for work it has done over the past two years preparing for upcoming patent losses on a number of key products.
Investors were already buying on Monday morning. Shares of Pfizer were up 4.3%. The company’s Covid-19 vaccine peer Moderna , meanwhile, which has suffered from the same investor uncertainties as Pfizer, was down 5.6%. On Monday, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said he expected U.S. uptake of this year’s Covid-19 booster shots to be 17% of the population, or around 56 million doses. That is well below the expectation Pfizer laid out in January, when it said it expected 24% of the population, or around 80 million people to get the shots. CFO David Denton had reiterated that guidance as recently as last month.
Bourla wasn’t clear on the investor call about whether he still thinks Covid-19 product demand to climb from here.