While AbbVie beat revenue expectations in the fourth quarter of 2023, the company reported Friday that its overall sales last year declined as it faced biosimilar competition for its blockbuster Humira.
Pictured: AbbVie sign on a building/courtesy of Adobe Stock, Michael Vi
While Humira revenue dropped in the fourth quarter of 2023, AbbVie beat revenue expectations from Wall Street while raising its long-term sales outlook for two immunology drugs, the company announced Friday.
The Illinois-based pharma posted a global 2023 net revenue of $54.3 billion, marking a 6.4% decrease from 2022. Its total sales in the immunology sector were $26.1 billion, marking a decline of 9.6% from the previous year. AbbVie reported that this decrease was due to “Humira biosimilar competition.”
The arthritis drug managed to bring in $14.4 billion globally, a 32% drop from the previous year. However, its other two major immunology drugs—Skyrizi and Rinvoq—did much better as Skyrizi pulled in $7.7 billion last year, a 50% jump from 2022 while Rinvoq had $3.9 billion in sales, a 57% bump.
Global profits for its oncology sector were posted at $5.9 billion, a 10% decrease from last year. Imbruvica had sales of $3.5 billion, a 21% drop from last year. However, sales of Venclexta were at $2.8 billion, marking a 13% lift from 2022.
While AbbVie saw drops in these sectors, its neuroscience sector did see an increase from 2022, posting $7.7 billion in sales, representing an 18.2% rise from last year.
Despite some of the financial declines in some sectors, AbbVie CEO Richard Gonzalez in a statement remained bullish on last year’s performance.
“2023 was another outstanding year, marked by strong operational execution and significant overperformance from our non-Humira growth platform. During the year, we meaningfully increased R&D investment and bolstered our pipeline with the proposed ImmunoGen and Cerevel Therapeutics acquisitions,” Gonzalez said.
For 2024, Gonzalez noted in his statement that the pharma is “well positioned to fully absorb” the Humira “erosion” and feels the company will achieve modest operational revenue growth, with more growth coming in 2025.
Looking longer term, AbbVie expects high single-digit growth in revenue through 2029 as it sees Skyrizi and Rinvoq garnering more than $27 billion for the company through 2027. Also, products such as Ubrelvy and Quipta will bring in more than $3 billion when their sales peak, according to the company.
On the Humira front, while there has been the potential for a significant loss in sales for AbbVie, a report released in January 2024 found that Humira has lost only 2% of its market share despite increased biosimilar competition. This also comes as at the beginning of last month CVS Caremark announced it would remove Humira from its national commercial template formularies and would cover the biosimilars instead.
AbbVie was active in the deal space in 2023 with a $10 billion buy of ImmunoGen, gaining access to its antibody-drug conjugate to treat ovarian cancer, as well as an $8.7 billion buy of Cerevel Therapeutics and its pipeline of psychiatric and neurological treatments.
Tyler Patchen is a staff writer at BioSpace. You can reach him at tyler.patchen@biospace.com. Follow him on LinkedIn.
