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The company earned $3.3 billion on revenue of $5 billion in the quarter. But analysts polled by Refinitiv had predicted revenues to be $3.9 billion on $6.2 billion in revenue.
More worrying for investors is that the vaccine maker now says it expects annual sales between $15 billion and $18 billion. Three months ago, it forecast $20 billion in revenue for the year.
Moderna said it faces manufacturing and shipping issues that will push some of its deliveries back to 2022, especially for overseas exports. The company expects to ship between 700 million and 800 million doses of its vaccine, less than the 800 million to 1 billion doses it had expected. Moderna said it will prioritize low-income countries.
The Covid vaccine is the first major product Moderna has produced and is responsible for almost all of its business, although it is working on other drugs.
The company’s executives admitted that Moderna was going through growing pains as it moved from research and development to providing a product that is in high demand worldwide. It said part of the reason for the reduced guidance for 2021 shipments is because of longer delivery times for international shipments that could push deliveries to early 2022.
“The supply chain became more complex with more deliveries to many countries around the world,” CEO Stéphane Bancel said during comments to investors on Thursday. “At the beginning of the year, we have only supplied a few major countries. We are working on these challenges.”
Aside from supply chain issues, some supply issues were due to difficulties in ramping up production capacity.
“We expanded our capacity with our manufacturing partners, which had a temporary impact on our shipments,” Bancel said. “That work is now complete and we should see a positive impact from this expansion very soon.”
One of the problems the company faced earlier this year was finding the vials needed to contain the vaccine, Bancel told investors.
“The first quarter was all about making enough drug substance, and we literally weren’t waiting to have enough … vials,” he said. “In the second quarter, the challenge we had internally was all about finding bottles.”
But he said the vial supply problems are now largely behind us and the problem has shifted to the difficulty of delivering the vaccines. Early shipments to the US government and governments in Europe were relatively easy, but the company is struggling now that it ships to dozens of different countries around the world.
“We really believe we can solve those delivery issues in the short term,” Bancel said. “I’d classify that as having trouble scaling up so quickly.”
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Sources 2/ https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/04/investing/moderna-earnings-covid-vaccine-shipments/index.html The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article |
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