Novartis feels heat from copycat drugs

Novartis' copycat products put pressure on business at the start of the year Keystone-SDA

Novartis has felt the dampening effect of generic drugs at the start of the year. Nevertheless, management confirmed its previous outlook for the further course of business.

+ Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

Turnover for the first quarter totalled $13.1 billion, a decrease of 1% compared to the same period last year. At constant exchange rates, the decline was 5%. By comparison, revenue in the final quarter of 2025 was still up by 1% and in the third quarter of the year by 8%.

According to its own earlier statements, the pharmaceutical group will experience the heaviest burden from copycat drugs in its history in the coming months because the billion-euro drugs Entresto, Promacta and Tasigna have lost their patent protection.

CEO Vas Narasimhan estimated the impact on sales at around $4 billion at the beginning of February. The impact is likely to be significantly greater in the first half of the year, he added.

The Basel-based company recorded a 9% drop in operating profit to $4.2 billion. The bottom line was a consolidated profit of $3.2 billion after $3.6 billion in the same period of the previous year. The decline was mainly due to the lower operating result.

For analysts, however, the core operating profit adjusted for various factors is the most important factor. At $4.9 billion, this fell by 12% and thus fell short of the AWP consensus of $5.2 billion.

The group confirms its previous target for the year as a whole. At constant exchange rates, the management is aiming for sales growth in the low single-digit percentage range. Core operating profit is expected to decline in the low single-digit percentage range.

Translated from German with AI/mga

How we work

We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.  

Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.

If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at [e-mail].