Mylan shares tumble as drugmakers feel pain from falling prices
Shares of EpiPen Maker Mylan (NASDAQ:MYL) fell as much as 5% Wednesday morning after an upbeat earnings report fell short of Wall Street expectations and the company issued a cautionary note on its future performance.
In the second quarter, Mylan’s profit surged 76% to $297 million, or 55 cents per share. Earnings, adjusted for non-recurring costs, came to $1.10 per share, well below the per-share estimates of $1.18 that Wall Street was seeking, according to a survey by Zacks Investment Research.
Revenue surged 15.6 percent to $2.96 billion on higher sales in Europe, largely due to products now owned by Mylan after its buyout of the Swedish drugmaker, Meda. However, that too was short of analyst expectations.
Falling prices of generic drugs in addition to a decline in sales of Mylan’s EpiPen Auto-Injector, following a decision to start selling a lower-priced generic version, caused the company to assume a more conservative stance on its financial performance moving forward.
"Given the region's ongoing challenges and the uncertain U.S. regulatory environment, we have elected to defer all major U.S. launches from our full year 2017 financial guidance to 2018, including generic Advair and generic Copaxone," said CEO Heather Bresch. "As a result, we now expect to deliver total revenues this year of between $11.5 billion and $12.5 billion."
The previous projection from Mylan was for revenue of between $12.25 billion and $13.75 billion.
The expectations for all of fiscal 2018 were also trimmed, from $6 a share, to $5.40 a share.
Citi analyst Liav Abraham said that Mylan's struggles mimic earlier quarterly reports from others in the generic industry.
"This morning's earnings, while consistent with the larger generic players thus far (TEVA and Sandoz in particular), are nonetheless not particularly reassuring, and point to structural issues in the US generics landscape," Abraham wrote.
Mylan shares have declined 17% since the beginning of the year.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.