By Dhirendra Tripathi
Investing.com – Moderna , Inc. (NASDAQ:MRNA) stock surged 11.2% Thursday after the company forecast higher vaccine sales for the second half of the year, pinning its estimates on COVID-19 becoming a flu-like endemic illness that will lead people to take shots on a regular basis.
The gains have been helped by the company’s plan to buy back shares worth $3 billion, following a similar exercise of $1 billion that concluded last month.
The biotech firm expects $19 billion in sales of its Spikevax vaccine this year compared to $18.5 billion it had forecast earlier. But the company also said that options for 2022 orders were $3 billion, down from its last month’s announcement of $3.5 billion.
Full-year revenue was $18.5 billion. Just over three months back, the company had cut the forecast for 2021 vaccine sales to $15 billion-$18 billion after it claimed to have signed agreements for $20 billion.
In the past year, the company delivered 807 million doses of the only product it sells; a fourth of those went to low- and middle-income countries.
The company’s life-saving vaccine is priced below value while the pandemic lasts, and the company aims to change that pricing strategy when COVID-19 begins to subside. Proceeds from those sales are going into funding the company’s research in developing mRNA vaccines and treatments for other diseases like cancer and tuberculosis.
The company said it is working on a new bivalent booster vaccine, which combines an Omicron-specific booster and the original Spikevax vaccine.
Total revenue in the fourth quarter was $7.2 billion compared to $571 million in the same period a year ago. October-December sales of the vaccine came to be 297 million. Net profit was $4.9 billion compared to a loss last time.