Moderna (NASDAQ:MRNA) today reported fourth-quarter results that beat the Wall Street consensus on revenue but missed on earnings.
Demand for the company’s COVID-19 vaccines is down, and there is surplus production capacity.
Investors reacted by sending MRNA shares down more than 1% to $156.51 apiece in morning trading.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts–based creator of mRNA-based therapies and vaccines earned $1.5 billion, or $3.61 per share, off of $5.1 billion during the quarter that ended Dec. 31, 2022. Earnings were less than a third of what they were during Q4 2021. Revenue was down nearly 30%.
Wall Street analysts had expected an EPS of $4.68 and $5.02 billion in revenue.
“2022 was another impressive year for Moderna, with over $19 billion in revenue and significant clinical breakthroughs across our portfolio. We continue to provide our Omicron-targeting bivalent vaccines worldwide, with the latest real-world evidence highlighting the continued protection of our vaccines against hospitalization and death,” CEO Stéphane Bance said in a news release.
“Our infectious disease platform continues to progress with positive Phase 3 data in RSV for older adults. We are investing to scale Phase 3 manufacturing for personalized cancer vaccines so that we can run several Phase 3 studies simultaneously. With planned R&D investments of $4.5 billion for the year, I am excited about the new medicines we believe we will bring to patients in the coming few years.”
Moderna said it presently has roughly $5 billion worth of COVID-19 vaccine contracted for delivery in 2023. That’s less than a third of the $18.4 billion worth of vaccines sold in 2022, up 4% from 2021.
The cost of sales was $5.4 billion, or 29% of the product sales for 2022. It was 15% in 2021. Moderna reported overall lower demand, in particular from low-income countries, a shift in product demand to its Omicron-targeting COVID-19 bivalent boosters, and costs associated with surplus production capacity.