Johnson & Johnson exceeded fourth-quarter earnings estimates, reporting nearly $21.4 billion in revenue, as its pharma business faces a patent cliff with Stelara competition entering the market.
Pictured: J&J office in Spain/iStock, BrasilNut1
Johnson & Johnson’s fourth-quarter 2023 earnings report Tuesday revealed the pharma giant exceeded Wall Street expectations. Revenue for the quarter came in at $21.4 billion, compared to consensus estimates of $21.01 billion, a 7% increase from the same quarter last year.
J&J benefitted from a continued boost to its medical device business, which has been recovering steadily from its pandemic-induced dip as patients and doctors canceled elective surgeries. Fourth-quarter sales of medical devices were up 13.3% compared to the same quarter in 2022, bringing in $7.67 billion. J&J CFO Joseph Wolk attributed this to a further procedure increase in December 2023 and the company’s $16.6 billion acquisition of heart pump company Abiomed at the end of 2022.
Full-year 2023 sales for the company rose 6.5% to $85.2 billion. J&J’s innovative medicine business represented 9.5% of fourth-quarter operational sales growth versus the prior year, excluding J&J’s COVID-19 vaccine.
Weighing down J&J’s pharma business is a patent for one of its best sellers, Stelara, which expired last year. However, the company struck deals to delay the competition from launching their biosimilars. Amgen is first in line and has agreed to not launch until 2025, meaning Stelara can continue to add to J&J’s bottom line for 2024 and into 2025. Biosimilars are expected in Europe a bit earlier, mid-year 2024. Sales of the immunology drug were up 11.7% from 2022, bringing in $10.9 billion for the year.
Also leading the company’s drug sales was J&J’s oncology portfolio. Immunotherapy multiple myeloma (MM) drug Darzalex grew over 22%, raking in $9.7 billion in full-year sales. Its CAR-T therapy for MM was under scrutiny by the FDA for the “serious risk” of secondary malignancies in patients treated with this type of immunotherapy. The agency has asked J&J as well as BMS, Gilead and Novartis to add boxed warnings to the labels of their respective CAR-T therapies, noting the potential risks. Sales of J&J’s CAR-T therapy Carvykti came in at $500 million for 2023.
With the Stelara biosimilar entry in Europe this year, J&J is expecting “slightly stronger sales” in the first half of 2024 compared to the second half of the year due to continued uptake of recently launched products. The company has already announced its first acquisition of the year—Ambrx Biopharma for $2 billion—to add the next generation of antibody-drug conjugates to its oncology portfolio.
J&J sales forecast for the full-year 2024 is set at $87.8 billion to $88.6 billion. Shares of the company were down around 3% in Tuesday morning trading.
Kate Goodwin is a freelance life science writer based in Des Moines, Iowa. She can be reached at kate.goodwin@biospace.com and on LinkedIn.
