The German mRNA company BioNTech, owner and legal manufacturer of what is more commonly known as the “Pfizer” COVID-19 vaccine, has fallen on hard times. Well, not so hard, given that BioNTech cleared nearly €30 billion in profits on sales of the product during 2021 and 2022 and still has a reported €18 billion in cash or cash equivalents on hand.
But, in any case, with no other product authorised for use and the market for COVID-19 vaccines, needless to say, having crashed, BioNTech has gone back to losing money. This was all it ever did in fact from the time of its founding in 2008 until 2021, and, as reported in a recent article in the German daily Der Tagesspiegel, the firm booked €300 million in losses in the first quarter of 2024 on €187.6 million in sales.
But apparently the firm is confident that good times – for it, at any rate – are just around the corner, since, according to its projections, it will achieve total sales roughly 15 times greater than that for 2024 as a whole: namely, between €2.5 and €3.1 billion. Thus, BioNTech Chief Financial Officer Jens Holstein notes: “We expect to achieve around 90% of our total annual sales in the final months of 2024, primarily in the fourth quarter of 2024.”
Even Der Tagesspiegel finds these projections surprising – or “ambitious”, as the paper puts it. Thus, it notes:
In 2023, [BioNTech’s] fourth quarter sales did not even account for 40% of total sales, and in 2022 it was even less at barely 25%. Even the entire second half of 2023 accounted altogether for just 62.2% of total sales. In each of the last two years, BioNTech achieved a third of total sales already in the first quarter.
Let’s take BioNTech’s projected 2024 total sales of from €2.5 to €3.1 billion and split the difference, assuming that total sales will come in at €2.8 billion for the year. 90% of €2.8 billion is €2.52 billion.
This is 13 times greater than the first quarter figure. But given what is now widely accepted as the flu-like seasonality of Covid infections, the first quarter should be just as much a “good” quarter for Covid products as the fourth quarter – and this is borne out in the aforementioned figures from Der Tagesspiegel.
Moreover, the €2.5 billion in projected fourth quarter sales is not far off the astronomical quarterly sums that BioNTech was pulling in during the high Covid period. In the second quarter of 2022, for instance, BioNTech had €3.2 billion in sales. In the fourth quarter of 2022, it had €4.3 billion.
Why is the firm expecting to make so much money in the autumn? Does BioNTech know something that we don’t?
Robert Kogon is the pen name of a widely-published journalist covering European affairs. Subscribe to his Substack.
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