$PFE is now trading below its COVID lows!
Recently $GSK filed a lawsuit against the company, alleging they used their patented mRNA technology without authorization.
$PFE stock pays a juicy 6.5% dividend, but that hasn't been enough to get investors interested in it.
Where do you think this thing ultimately bottoms out?
$PFE is on a cost cutting mission, shuttering R&D and other facilities. That could help in the short-term, but in the long-term one has to question how the company intends to keep innovating if it is going to "externalize" more research and shutter more facilities.
This is a theme, closures, cost cutting. Largely centered around R&D. Which has me asking myself, what does the future patented product pipeline look like for a firm that seems to be aggressively reducing its long-term innovative potential?
One after another, $PFE plants are seeing layoffs or complete closures. Again, probably positive in the short-term because of reduced OpEx and CapEx, but in the long-term this is going to hurt drug discovery and new product development quite a bit.
And it's not just R&D that's the target of closures, it is also manufacturing. Is that telling us that they already anticipate overall lower demand for their portfolio of products? Certainly, we could expect that with COVID jabs, and Paxlovid, both of which had questionable efficacy. But what of the rest of their portfolio?
Many of these closures also impact companies that $PFE had purchased and attempted to (but failed to) integrate into their operations. That gives us a sense that the M&A prowess of the company is also not firing on all cylinders...
The fundamentals aren't very inspiring either for $PFE, with the only area of growth shown here being sales over the past five years. Everything else looks, well, atrocious. I can see why management would be in a panic to cut costs and shutter operations.
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