AstraZeneca — the struggling drugmaker without a permanent boss since chief executive David Brennan quit after coming under pressure from angry shareholders — today had another ailment to deal with after second-quarter sales plunged by a fifth.
Sales tumbled 21% to $6.6 billion (£4.3 billion) in the three months to June, hit both by generic competition to Astra’s best-selling antipsychotic medicine Seroquel and the squeeze on health spending from European governments.
Revenues in Western Europe fell 20%, in line with bigger British rival GlaxoSmithKline, which yesterday admitted that revenues will be flat this year instead of the hoped-for return to growth, because of Europe’s financial strife situation.
But Astra has other difficulties too: Brennan shocked the City when he quit in April in an apparent boardroom coup just hours before the FTSE 100 pharmaceutical giant’s shareholder meeting kicked off. Investors were angry about Astra’s dramatically plunging revenues as key drugs faced generic competition, as well as its weak pipeline of new drugs, and today threw up fresh evidence of just how bad its predicament is.
Simon Lowth, Astra’s finance director who was promoted to interim chief executive, said: “As we expected, the loss of exclusivity on some key brands and tough market conditions have resulted in a decline in revenue and earnings in the second quarter. Despite these challenges, we are on track to achieve our financial targets for the full year.”
The City wasn’t as easily impressed: shares fell 41.5p to 2868p.
