Drugmakers Roche and Sanofi’s latest earnings were largely as expected, with the companies talking up the potential of experimental medicines ahead of a looming “patent cliff” for Big Pharma.
Both companies’ stocks were down less than 1% on Thursday after reporting earnings before the bell.
They are both among the pharmaceutical companies that could see revenue fall dramatically in the coming years unless they top up their pipelines by developing drugs internally or acquiring drug candidates developed by others.
“On the pipeline side, we’ve had an amazing run of a number of Phase 3 readouts that are going to be instrumental for future growth,” the CEO Thomas Schinecker told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Thursday.
“We have a number of medicines that we’ve now moved into the late stage of development, and we will have up to 19 new medicines that we can launch by the end of the decade.”
Innovation in focus
Sanofi posted a quarterly beat on both top and bottom lines, and issued 2026 guidance largely in line with expectations.
It reported fourth-quarter sales growth of 13% at constant currencies and earnings per share of 1.53 euros ($1.20), both above forecasts, even with headwinds in its vaccine business thanks to changes in U.S. vaccine policy.
“Growth was supported by new medicines and Dupixent, reaching a new quarterly high,” CEO Paul Hudson said in a statement.
Similar to Roche, Sanofi also sees sales growing by high-single digits in 2026, with profit growth “slightly higher than revenue.”
“We anticipate profitable growth to continue over at least five years,” the company said.
Despite the beat and a newly announced 1 billion euro share buyback, the focus for Sanofi investors remains on the company’s research and development.
The need to expand the pipeline will put long-term R&D spend and the potential future M&A front and center in Sanofi’s earnings call on Thursday afternoon, Jefferies analyst Michael Leuchten said in a note after earnings.
The obesity entry
Apart from its experimental breast cancer drug giredestrant and MS treatment fenebrutinib, Roche is betting big on a slice of the lucrative obesity market in the coming years.
The company is facing key loss of exclusivity for some of its best-selling drugs, but CEO Schinecker told CNBC’s that this was “absolutely manageable.”
On Tuesday, the company reported positive Phase 2 clinical trial results for its weight-loss candidate CT-388. It showed that the drug resulted in a 22.5% weight reduction over 48 weeks, on par with market rivals Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy and Eli Lilly’s Zepbound. The company hopes it to be able to compete in the increasingly crowded market through differentiation.
Last year, Roche also entered into a partnership with Danish Zealand Pharma to co-develop Zealand’s drug petrelintide, an amylin analog, as a stand-alone as well as in combination with CT-388.
“We’re not investing in [the] first generation of these medicines – we’re investing in the next generation,” CEO Schinecker told CNBC on Thursday.
“We can differentiate in combination with other therapies we have in house, because there are more than 200 comorbidities in neurology, in immunology, in cancer, and none of the other players have the kind of portfolio that we have for combinations,” he said, adding that there was also windows for differentiation with the longer lasting molecule itself, as well as in diagnostics.