On January 13, American vaccine manufacturer Moderna lowered its 2025 sales forecast by $1 billion to cut costs. The company's stock price plummeted 17% at the close of the day.

Moderna's latest forecast is that revenue in 2025 will be between $1.5 billion and $2.5 billion, a sharp drop from the $2.5 billion to $3.5 billion forecast in September last year. Moderna said that most of these sales will come from sales of the COVID-19 vaccine and the newly launched respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine in the second half of 2025. In 2024, the company's revenue from these two vaccines is about $3 billion.

Demand for Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine is falling rapidly. The company's COVID-19 vaccine revenue reached $18 billion and $6.7 billion in 2022 and 2023, respectively. Other COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers, Novavax and BioNTech, are also actively seeking transformation.

Moderna Chief Financial Officer Jamey Mock said that the company still needs to prepare for some uncertainties in 2025, including a decline in the retail market share of COVID-19 vaccines. In 2024, the company's COVID-19 vaccine market share has dropped from 48% in 2023 to 40%.

In 2024, Moderna's respiratory syncytial virus vaccine was approved by the US FDA to enter the market, becoming the company's second commercialized product after the COVID-19 vaccine. Moderna expects that the company may have three new vaccines approved in 2025.

However, just as Moderna's RSV vaccine was commercialized, in September 2024, the company announced that it would cut research and development funds by $1 billion. At that time, market participants regarded Moderna's drastic cuts in research and development as a "deterioration of its financial situation" and believed that its business would be difficult to rebound in the short term. Investment bank Jefferies analysis believes that Moderna's profitability is expected to be delayed until 2028.

It is worth noting that Moderna's factory progress in China may slow down due to the company's cost-cutting. Since announcing its investment in building a factory in China in 2023, Moderna has not disclosed the progress of the Shanghai factory in the past year. As of press time, the relevant person in charge of the company has not yet responded to the reporter of Yicai.

However, according to information revealed by Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel in a media interview before the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference, Moderna does not intend to transfer its proprietary mRNA technology to the Chinese market, and Moderna's business in China is not required to transfer technology as a condition.

Moderna previously had great confidence in the Chinese market. The company had planned to conduct clinical trials of as many products as possible in China to promote the company's next stage of growth. In addition to investing in factories in China, Moderna is also promoting cooperation with local companies in China. In August 2023, the company cooperated with Shanghai Coherus Biotech to explore whether an mRNA-based cancer vaccine can be used in combination with Coherus Biotech's experimental CAR-T cancer therapy to fight gastric cancer and pancreatic cancer.

In contrast, Moderna's global competitors are also taking more radical measures.

In November 2024, German biotechnology company BioNTech announced the acquisition of Chinese biopharmaceutical company BioMed for $800 million to enhance its oncology drug pipeline. The company will also add a research and development center in China.

https://finance.eastmoney.com/a/202501143297075428.html