Poor Pfizer. Their shares dropped to an eight-month low on worries that the top-selling drug Lipitor is losing to cheaper competitors.
The stock fell 45 cents, or 2 percent, to $22.42 at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The 5.4 percent decline this week for New York-based Pfizer, the world's largest drugmaker, made it one of the biggest losers in the Standard & Poor's 500 health-care index.
Lipitor's share of the U.S. market for cholesterol drugs slipped to less than 31 percent in the last week of June from almost 33 percent, JPMorgan analyst Chris Shibutani said on Monday in a note to clients.
The erosion began after initial sales figures were released for generic copies of Merck's Zocor (simvastatin), another cholesterol drug.
''Lipitor is approximately 40 percent of the company's profits so it is pretty important, and other drugs aren't going to offset that," analyst Barbara Ryan at Deutsche Bank said in an interview on Friday.
On the positive side Pfizer CEO Hank McKinnell has his retirement pension all figured out!
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1 comment:
Warner Lambert was such a good buy for Pfizer...
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