Dive Brief:
- Johnson & Johnson’s first-quarter results beat Wall Street’s expectations, as its innovative medicines division posted sales of just over $15 billion, an 11% increase over the same period in 2025. Overall company sales rose just shy of 10%, too, though net profit plummeted by more than half, to just over $5 billion.
- J&J delivered that strong growth amid plummeting numbers for the autoimmune drug Stelara, which was once its biggest product but began facing biosimilar competition last year. The company’s newer autoimmune medication Tremfya, as well as its oncology portfolio, are helping offset those losses, posting 74% and 20% sales growth, respectively.
- The first-quarter results also led J&J to slightly hike its 2026 guidance from January’s forecast. It now expects total annual sales to edge over $100 billion and per-share earnings to come in between $11.45 and $11.65.
Dive Insight:
Stelara, as recently as 2024, was J&J’s most lucrative drug, with more than $10 billion in sales that constituted nearly 12% of the company’s overall revenue. But J&J has found an able successor in Tremfya, which works similarly to Tremfya and, since its 2017 launch, has been cleared to treat most of the same immunological conditions.
The newer drug has yet to completely offset Stelara’s decline; J&J’s immunology drugs fell nearly 9% in the first quarter compared to the same period last year. Still, Tremfya is poised to become a bigger seller, as clearances over the last few years in Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis helped it reach $1.6 billion in the first quarter alone, RBC Capital Markets analyst Shagun Singh wrote in a client note.
J&J’s oncology portfolio — particularly its four-drug franchise of multiple myeloma treatments — has proven a steadier counterweight to Stelara’s losses. Darzalex alone posted nearly $4 billion in first-quarter sales, and the overall business, which includes the cell therapy Carvykti and the bispecific antibodies Tecvayli and Talvey, added about $5 billion to J&J’s top line. Darzalex’s main U.S. patents are due to expire in 2029, though, so J&J will need new or existing products to help absorb that upcoming loss.
In the meantime, though, J&J executives said they believe the company is on track to achieve double-digit sales growth for the entire company, including its medical devices business, by the end of the decade. Expanded use of multiple myeloma drugs and a newly launched psoriasis pill called Icotyde are among the drivers of future growth, they said.
