Last week we took you through why COVID mitigation would help one of our favorite device plays: Intuitive Surgical.
Well, this week, we're going to explore the other side of that equation.
Because with COVID treatment waning, some analysts expected big pharma plays that were buffeted by COVID, to take a bad hit as we slip into a more endemic phase of the COVID-19 outbreak.
But for all the big players in our pharma portfolio, that really isn't the case.
Brilliant management has helped these pharma plays pivot back to core treatments just in time as COVID revenue completely collapses. This is one of those weird moments as an investor where you're actually pretty happy to watch a revenue line-item crash over 80% YoY.
Such was the case for pillar 1 of our pharma portfolio's foundation: Merck & Co ($MRK). Merck saw revenue from their COVID breakthrough Molnupiravir drop 88% YoY in their latest quarterly earnings.
And yet, the stock has climbed a few points since then -- enough to force us to bump up our price target before we fall behind.
So, what gives? The answer is simple:
COVID is being made fairly irrelevant across a LOT of big pharma. Instead, a new battleground is brewing as revolutionary cancer treatments are getting huge waves of adoption.
For Merck, their oncology portfolio is about to blow wide open as their incredible Keytruda treatment is poised to receive key approvals for a broad spectrum of cancers.
Moreover, Merck's oncology pipeline is absurd as this Keytruda technology is gearing up for key synergies with treatments from the likes of Moderna.
It's a new age here in big pharma, and the new battleground is going to be spending the next 25 years chipping away at and defeating cancer.
Maybe that's too rosy of a look, but we're really excited to enter into big pharma's post-COVID phase.
Let's dive into the details and see how the folks are Merck can pull this off 👇