The sharp drop in demand for the coronavirus vaccine is putting pressure on drug manufacturer Dermapharm.

In view of declining vaccine sales, the company from Grünwald near Munich currently expects to reach the lower end of its forecasts for the past year, said CFO Christof Dreibholz on Thursday. As a partner of BioNTech, Dermapharm produces some of the doses of the Comirnaty vaccine. The company had targeted an increase in sales of ten to 13 percent and an increase in adjusted operating profit (EBITDA) of three to seven percent for 2022.

At the lower end of the range, this would correspond to sales of around 1.04 billion and adjusted EBITDA of 362 million euros. At the end of the first nine months of 2022, turnover was up almost ten percent on the previous year at 734 million euros, while EBITDA grew by five percent to 239 million euros.

"Now that the active phase of the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic has ended successfully, vaccine sales are expected to decline," said Dreibholz. Dermapharm had therefore purchased its French competitor Arkopharma for 450 million euros from financial investor Montagu Private Equity - "a company (...) that more than compensates for the decline in sales from the BioNTech cooperation and achieves solid profitability", as the CFO explained. Founded in 1980, the manufacturer of natural medicines generated sales of more than 200 million euros in 2022 (2021: 191 million euros) and an operating profit of more than 40 million euros.

(Report by Alexander Hübner. Edited by Christian Götz. If you have any queries, please contact our editorial team at berlin.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for politics and the economy) or frankfurt.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for companies and markets).)