I am looking for your opinon on Bextra. What do you think?
Should Bextra have been pulled when the oter Bextra similar drugs were pulled?
Have you taken Bextra?
Do you know anyone who has taken Bextra?
Please feel free to use the comments part to write whatever you want...
I'd love to hear your Bextra opinions.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Pfizer Inc. (PFE), the world's largest drugmaker, on Tuesday said first-quarter earnings tumbled on charges for the suspension of sales of its arthritis drug Bextra and the repatriation of overseas profit.
Pfizer said it earned $301 million, or 4 cents per share, compared with $2.33 billion, or 30 cents per share, a year earlier.
Excluding special items, earnings would have been 54 cents per share. Analysts polled by Reuters Estimates, on average, expected 53 cents per share, which was the company's own forecast.
Pfizer forecast 2005 earnings would fall almost 7 percent to $1.98 per share, excluding one-time items, down 2 cents from the forecast it gave two weeks ago. It reaffirmed its growth forecast for 2006 and 2007.
``Pfizer is still saying that 2005 will be a transition year and that strong growth will resume in 2006 and 2007, so their slightly lower earnings guidance for this year is immaterial,'' said Cathay Financial analyst Sena Lund.
Pfizer, which is based in New York, took a charge of $2.19 billion in the quarter for the planned repatriation this year of $28.3 billion in profits earned overseas and $766 million in charges for Bextra.
Earlier this month, Pfizer agreed to suspend sales of Bextra after U.S. and European regulators said the risk of serious side effects from the drug, including a potentially fatal skin allergy, outweighed the benefits.
The company had been counting on Bextra, which had sales in 2004 of $1.3 billion, to bolster profits at a time when Pfizer's earnings growth has careened to a halt due to generic competition for other medicines.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration also asked Pfizer to add a black box warning -- the strongest possible -- to the label for its older arthritis drug, Celebrex.
Celebrex is in the same Cox-2 family of drugs as Bextra and Vioxx, the Merck & Co. (MRK) medicine that was pulled off the market last year after being shown to double the risk of heart attack and stroke.
Global sales of Celebrex, one of Pfizer's other long-time engines of profit growth, fell 47 percent in the first quarter to $411 million.
Quarterly sales of Pfizer's cholesterol fighter Lipitor, the world's top-selling drug, jumped 23 percent to $3.08 billion. Patients have flocked to the potent medicine following new studies showing the lower cholesterol is driven the less risk patients have of heart attack and stroke.
Lund, who holds shares in Pfizer, said Lipitor's annual sales will likely increase to ``well over $15 billion'' if future U.S. guidelines suggest even lower levels of ``bad'' LDL cholesterol.
Pfizer said quarterly sales of impotence treatment Viagra grew only 5 percent to $438 million, amid competition from Eli Lilly and Co.'s (LLY) longer-acting Cialis. Sales of epilepsy treatment Neurontin, now facing competition from cheaper generics, fell 74 percent to $182 million. Anti-depressant Zoloft rose 4 percent to $845 million, growth checked by concerns that its class of medicines may increase the risk of suicidal behavior.
Although earnings will fall this year due to patent expirations and declining sales of its arthritis drugs, Pfizer repeated previous forecasts of double-digit profit growth in 2006 and 2007, thanks largely to aggressive cost-cutting.
