Dive Brief:
- Sanofi topped Wall Street expectations for sales and profit in the first quarter, offering an optimistic financial report just before a new CEO takes over.
- Net sales climbed 6.2% to 10.5 billion euros, or about $12.3 billion, buoyed by higher-than-expected demand for the anti-inflammatory drug Dupixent. Sales of that medicine alone jumped 31% to 4.2 billion euros, Sanofi said Thursday. That beat analyst estimates by more than 6%.
- The French drugmaker reaffirmed guidance for the year, saying it expected sales to increase by a high single-digit percentage in 2026 at constant exchange rates. Earnings should grow “slightly faster” than sales, the company said.
Dive Insight:
The latest earnings report comes at what may be an inflection point for Sanofi. In February, the company jettisoned its CEO of six years, Paul Hudson, in favor of Belén Garijo, who was preparing to step down after leading German drugmaker Merck KGaA since 2021. Among other things, Sanofi said she would bring “an increased rigor to the implementation of Sanofi’s strategy.”
During Hudson’s tenure, Sanofi increasingly focused on immunology and cancer, benefiting from skyrocketing sales of Dupixent. But the company’s pipeline often disappointed, yielding setbacks last year for a key multiple sclerosis drug, an oral immune medicine and a treatment for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Thursday’s release included another failure, a Phase 2 study miss for a meningococcal vaccine.
Meanwhile, Sanofi’s long-held position as a vaccine powerhouse has been threatened by a “challenging environment,” including declining inoculation rates in the U.S. And investors are already looking toward competition for Dupixent, which ranked as the world’s fourth-best-selling medicine last year. Patent expirations are looming for the drug, and companies including Nektar Therapeutics and Kymera Therapeutics are developing would-be competitors.
Amidst all this, Sanofi’s stock has underperformed compared to many of its pharmaceutical peers. But the company is pointing investors to recent positive developments, including successes with medicines to treat Gaucher disease, a rare liver and lung condition called alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency and gut diseases like ulcerative colitis. Sanofi also has hopes for two other immunological drugs, each of which has had mixed study results.
The first-quarter financial report offered a bit of a reprieve for the vaccine unit as well. Sales in that business reached 1.3 billion euros in the quarter, compared with analyst estimates of as low as $1.25 billion. Sanofi said a newly acquired hepatitis B vaccine helped.
