GSK outperforms market expectations

GSK outperformed market expectations for its fourth-quarter results on Wednesday and released an optimistic outlook for 2024 as the pharmaceutical company increases the number of vaccines, infectious disease and cancer drugs it is developing.

This is the company’s first annual report on earnings following its July 2022 spinoff of the consumer healthcare division, Haleon.

Since then, the London-listed company has focused more intently on immunisations and infectious diseases, and GSK has tried to strengthen its drug pipeline with the $7 billion that the spin-off produced.

Furthermore, the market’s concerns regarding GSK’s drug development pipeline and the expensive litigation surrounding the discontinued heartburn medication Zantac in the United States have been allayed by the robust uptake of the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine Arexvy.

After a second-half launch, Arexvy recorded sales of 1.24 billion pounds for the year that concluded on December 31.

“We are now planning for at least 12 major launches from 2025, with new Vaccines and Specialty Medicines for infectious diseases, HIV, respiratory and oncology,” CEO Emma Walmsley stated.

Based on sales growth of 5-7 per cent, GSK anticipates an increase in adjusted profit per share of between 6 per cent and 9 per cent in 2024. This growth is comfortably above analysts’ growth expectations, according to a poll provided by the company.

By 2026, the company anticipates that sales will have grown by more than 7 per cent annually, up from an earlier forecast of 5 per cent.

LSEG data shows that on sales of 8.05 billion pounds ($10.20 billion), it reported a profit of 28.9 pence per share, compared with analysts’ average expectations of 28.63 pence profit on sales of 7.29 billion pounds.

($1 = 0.7892 pounds)