Wells Fargo Prediction: Which company will dominate the Covid vaccine market?

Wells Fargo recently started “covering” Pfizer with a “buy” rating and a target price of $ 60 per share, indicating an upward trend of 16% from current levels.

Wells Fargo analyst Mohit Bansal believes Pfizer’s anti-Covid treatments will generate significant revenue for the company in the “foreseeable future”, as new boosts will be needed to address declining immunity and new mutations. coronavirus ..

Pfizer’s vaccine business alone could generate more than $ 5 billion a year, the company predicts, as vaccines against Covid-19 “are likely to become an annual necessity.”

The importance of medicine

Vaccine maker’s new, oral antiviral pill, Paxlovid, “provides another growth pathway associated with Covid” and will “change the game” about the company’s profits – with the potential to generate sales worth almost 18 billions of dollars next year, says Bonsal.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said earlier this week that full data on antiviral therapy would soon be submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), with preliminary studies showing Paxlovid reduced the chances of hospitalization and death. by Covid by 89%.

Pfizer shares rose more than 2% to around $ 52 on Thursday and have now gained more than 42% since the beginning of 2021, beating gains of 26% in the S&P 500 benchmark.

Competitors

Shares of vaccine competitors such as Moderna and BioNTech have outpaced Pfizer for the current year, with shares up 171% and 258% respectively.

“We believe Wall is underestimating Pfizer’s ability to dominate the Covid market for many years to come,” said Wells Fargo analysts. They remain bullish on the core business of the company as a whole, with its progress being considered a matter of when and not if it will happen.

Despite the emergence of the new coronavirus’s Micron mutation, initial concerns have subsided amid reports that vaccines are effective against it. The leading specialist in infectious diseases in the USA, Dr. Anthony Fauci said recently that the initial figures were “encouraging”, while other reports indicated that the new variant was causing milder symptoms than expected. Pfizer and BioNTech both said earlier this week that they are continuing to work on vaccines specifically against Omicron, although three doses of existing vaccines are also effective in counteracting the variant.