Novartis to outperform wider pharma industry

Swiss-based Novartis is expected to be the world’s best performing pharmaceutical company over the next five years, bolstered by its vaccine and generics businesses.

According to industry analysts Datamonitor, Novartis is expected to deliver a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of a little over four percent through to 2015, based on sales projections of around $US10 billion. This compares to the pharmaceutical industry’s average growth rate of 1.4 percent.

London-based Datamonitor analyst Simon King said that Novartis’s strength lies in the heavily diversified nature of its prescription pharmaceutical offering, key elements of which include Sandoz, itself the world’s second largest producer of generics, while the vaccine business - gained through the acquisition of Chiron - is the world’s fifth largest.

“Whilst exposure of blockbuster brands to generic competition from 2011 onwards will decelerate sales growth from the branded pharmaceuticals portfolio, neither the vaccine nor Sandoz businesses will be exposed to a directly comparable competitive threat,” King said.

“This is an inherent factor that has both driven Novartis’s investment in these market segments and which will dictate stronger sales growth performances for these units over 2009-15”.

Meanwhile Novartis announced today that a Phase III study looking at its Afinitor (everolimus) tablets combined with best supportive care (BSC), resulted in better than double progression-free survival, or time without tumor growth, compared to placebo versus BSC in patients with advanced neuroendocrine tumors (NET). Afinitor is already approved for the treatment of patients with advanced renal cell carcinoma (RCC).