Moderna reports quarterly earnings on Thursday.
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Moderna shares are up about 66% so far this year, lapping the S&P 500, which is up about 11%. Early Thursday, investors will get a look at how Moderna plans to sustain this performance, as the company presents its first-quarter financial results.
Moderna (ticker: MRNA) has scheduled an earnings call for 8 a.m. ET on Thursday.
The earnings presentation comes after Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine rival, Pfizer (PFE), presented its own quarterly results on Tuesday. Pfizer beat Wall Street expectations, unlike most other big biopharma firms that have presented first-quarter earnings so far this year. It said it now expects $26 billion in Covid-19 vaccine sales this year.
Moderna will likely update its own 2021 vaccine sales projections on Thursday, giving investors a clearer picture of how the Covid-19 vaccine sales race is playing out.
Here’s a snapshot of investors’ expectations and recent history.
– Analysts expect Moderna to report first-quarter earnings of $2.39 per share, according to FactSet, in what would be the first quarter in the company’s history that it has posted positive earnings. They expect $2.1 billion in first-quarter sales.
– On Tuesday, Moderna announced it was expanding its manufacturing facility in Norwood, Massachusetts. Barron’s reported on the facility in an August, 2019 cover story.
– Earlier this week, Moderna said it had signed a deal to supply 34 million doses of its Covid-19 vaccine to COVAX, the vaccine access group, to be distributed to middle- and low-income countries in the fourth quarter of this year. The deal could be expanded to a total of 500 million doses by the end of 2022.
– Sanofi (SNY) said in late April that it will provide fill and finish capacity for up to 200 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine destined for the U.S. market beginning in September.
– Barron’s argued in a late April feature that worries that Moderna’s market capitalization is inflated are overblown. Moderna shares are trading at 8.4 times earnings expected over the next 12 months, according to FactSet.
– In a note out earlier this week, Jefferies analyst Michael Yee wrote that new data on a trial of a version of the Moderna vaccine targeting the South African variant of the virus could come soon. “We could see MRNA reacting well to near term Phase I variant immunogenicity data in the coming weeks,” Yee wrote.
– In February, Moderna reported losses of 69 cents per share in the fourth quarter of 2020, and sales of $571 million.
Write to Josh Nathan-Kazis at [email protected]
