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(Adds details from media call, shares)
By Ankur Banerjee and Ludwig Burger
Oct 28 (Reuters) - Britain's GSK cautioned full-year
earnings would likely come in at the lower end of its forecast
range after the COVID-19 pandemic took a toll on its vaccines
unit, with people in the United States shunning visits to their
physician for their shots.
GSK shares were down 1% at 1,347.2 pence after the
drugmaker's shingles vaccine Shingrix, the biggest driver of
sales growth last year, saw quarterly revenue fall 30% from a
year earlier to 374 million pounds ($487 million), some 18.5%
below market expectations.
While the pandemic has hit its businesses during the first
nine months of 2020, GSK said on Wednesday it had lately seen a
recovery in vaccination rates, with adult immunisations in the
United States returning to prior-year levels towards the end of
the quarter.
"What we saw through the quarter ... were definitely lower
vaccination rates in July and August," GSK CEO Emma Walmsley
said on a media call. "In September and indeed through the early
weeks of October, however, we are back at pre-pandemic levels."
For the drug industry as a whole the effects of COVID-19 on
vaccination behaviour has been at times erratic and difficult to
forecast. Pfizer for instance said on Tuesday that while
many people missed shots of its best-selling Prevnar 13 vaccine
(against pneumonia-causing bacteria) during the second quarter,
there had been a catch-up trend during the third quarter.
Merck & Co, for its part, said demand for its
pneumonia vaccine Pneumovax 23 had increased during the COVID-19
pandemic.
GSK is one of many drugmakers involved in a race to develop
a vaccine for COVID-19 but lags behind frontrunners like
AstraZeneca and Pfizer.
GSK is collaborating with Sanofi to develop a
vaccine, with late-stage trials expected to start in December.
The two companies have struck a deal to will supply 200
million doses of their COVID-19 candidate vaccine to a global
inoculation scheme backed by the World Health Organization.
For the quarter, GSK reported adjusted earnings of 35.6
pence per share and sales of 8.67 billion pounds.
Analysts on average had expected adjusted earnings of 30.4
pence per share and sales of 8.77 billion pounds, according to a
company-compiled consensus https://www.gsk.com/en-gb/investors/analyst-consensus/analyst-consensus
of 16 analysts.
GSK said it expects 2020 profit to be at the lower end of
its previous forecast of a drop of between 1% and 4%, which did
not include any potential impact from the coronavirus crisis.
($1 = 0.7673 pounds)
(Reporting by Ankur Banerjee in Bengaluru and Ludwig Burger in
Frankfurt
Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty and David Holmes)
