THE 5 LEADING VACCINE PLAYERS

The pharmaceutical industry is one of the biggest and most profitable in the world. Many of the individual corporations that constitute ‘Big Pharma’ enjoy annual revenues well in excess of the majority of countries on the planet.

1. Pfizer was in the top 30 most profitable corporations in the world last year, with $52 billion in revenue and a whopping $16 billion in profits. Its revenues are bigger than oil-rich Kuwait or Malaysia. The company is expected to make $15 billion in revenues in 2021  from the COVID-19 it developed with BioNTech SE  and has already sold 82% of the doses to rich countries. It’s the ninth most profitable corporation in the US.
2. Johnson & Johnson is currently the biggest pharmaceutical corporation in the world, making $82 billion in revenue over the last year, and $15 billion in profit. It was the seventh most profitable corporation in the US last year and in the top 30 most profitable corporations in the world. To put this in context, judged by revenue, Johnson and Johnson is vastly more wealthy than most countries in the world – richer even than rich countries like New Zealand and Hungary.
3. AstraZeneca made £25 billion in revenues last year, and £1 billion in profits, putting it in the top 20 British corporations. In May 2020, AstraZeneca (AZ) usurped Shell to become the UK’s most valuable company by market capitalization. Astra Zeneca could generate $ 1.9 billion in revenues for the shot in 2021 and  $ 3 billion in 2022.
4. US biotech firm Moderna is a relatively new company. Moderna  presold 780 million doses of its vaccine to rich governments representing just 12% of the global population. This is 78% of the one billion doses it has the capacity to produce by the end of this year. $2.5 billion of public money has gone into the drug’s development. Moderna expects $18.4 billion in product sales this year. This is based on already inked advance purchase agreements for its Covid vaccine.
5. Novavax sees the potential for several billion dollars in revenue in the next 12 months. Novavax expects to have capacity to make 2 billion doses a year by the midpoint of 2021, in large part due to its agreement with vaccine manufacturing giant Serum Institute of India.