Can Pfizer Repeat Its Covid Success?

The pharma giant sees a new era, but competitors are circling, and skeptics abound

- James E. Ellis and David Rocks

Pfizer Inc. emerged from the pandemic as the world’s most visible drugmaker, with the windfall from its coronavirus vaccine almost doubling its revenue in just one year. And now the shot, coupled with Pfizer’s Covid-19 antiviral pill, is poised to make up more than half of its expected $100 billion in sales in 2022. That’s left the company with a cash hoard of $28 billion and a big problem: how to engineer a second act.

The pressure is clearly on for Pfizer to show that the muscle it built during the pandemic won’t atrophy. Big Pharma companies don’t normally double revenue so quickly, and nobody expects that kind of growth to continue. But one thing’s clear: Pfizer can’t go back to the sluggish path it was on for years, when it largely grew by buying up other outfits with better drug candidates than it was able to discover in-house. Its stock has already fallen 25% in 2022 on fears that it might return to those ways, trailing the broader market and other drugmakers.

“Pfizer was boring before Covid,” says BMO Capital Markets Corp. analyst Evan David Seigerman. “They’re being penalized because either investors don’t see a future for Covid or they don’t have visibility into that future.”