Astrazeneca Share Discussion Threads

[selkirk69] 13/6/2025 15:00:17

Take any positives !3.5b tie up.with China and the shares, yet again on positive news, go down. Anyway, it's a marathon, not a sprint.

[smcni1968] 30/5/2025 17:45:20

Some news expected on their cancer drug this weekend

[geckotheglorious] 27/5/2025 09:15:23

Equity edge: Why is AstraZeneca so cheap?
Waverton UK equity research head explains why Trump’s bark may be worse than his bite for cheap AstraZeneca.

The long-term prospects of UK drug giant AstraZeneca (GB:AZN) look the brightest they have in years, but its shares are also near their cheapest in a decade.

Despite the angst evident from the shares’ valuation, Astra remains hugely popular with the world’s best portfolio managers tracked by Citywire resulting in it having a top AAA Elite Companies rating.

We’ve caught up with Tineke Frikkee, head of UK equity research at wealth manager Waverton Investment Management, to find out why Astra is so cheap and whether it is justified.

Triple Trump trouble
Sentiment towards drug manufacturers has taken a triple hit from Trump.

First it was tariffs, then Trump’s declaration the US should have ‘most-favoured-nation’ pricing for certain drug purchases, and mixed with all this are worries drug approvals could slow due to an organisational overhaul at the industry regulator, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

But why are drug makers in Trump’s firing line?

‘Most novel new drugs are launched in the US first because it’s a big market and also because the FDA is just a really well-oiled machine. Trump then claims the US is paying for all the R&D and everyone else is piggybacking,’ said Frikkee.

Trump has been trouble for AstraZeneca shares

But as Tump’s bombast has begun to collide with reality in multiple areas, Frikkee thinks his administration’s actions will struggle to match the rhetoric on pharmaceuticals.

All talk?
‘First, people wondered how tariffs would work?’ she said. ‘It is clear that a lot of pharmaceutical companies actually make US medicine in the US. The companies made that obvious in their last results.’

Most-favoured-nation pricing, meanwhile, whereby the US government would pay the lowest international price for drugs, faces problems due to the idiosyncrasies of the US health system.

‘The US is unique in that there is a wholesale price that medicine gets sold at and there is a net price that the US government actually buys at. And there are third party distributors that take a cut. That doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world.

‘When they compare the wholesale price in a country with their net price, that can be quite easily legally disputed… which tends to take two to three years,’ she said. ‘And this is product by product, so this is going to be a big exercise.

‘It is also not straightforward because the most recent drugs don’t have another price because the US is their first market.’

Meanwhile, in her conversations with Astra and other drug companies, Frikkee is yet to detect signs of real disruption to the functioning of the drug approval process.

Perhaps most fundamentally, she does not see the US as being the most convincing of victims.

‘The advantage of having all these patents filed in the US is the US receives patent tax, but Trump doesn’t talk about that,’ she said. ‘And I don’t think he wants headlines that US citizens are being denied novel drugs.’

Astra 2030
Developments in the US are a big issue for Astra given it makes just over two fifths of sales inthe country. But beyond these worries, its underlying business looks in great shape following an extensive period of restructuring and investment since the appointment of Pascal Soriot as chief executive in mid 2012.

‘Soriot decided that there was far more value that they could create internally and really revamped the research and development (R&D) processes to being much more commercial, said Frikkee. ‘That takes time, and it was from 2018 that they started to really deliver consistently.’

As well as reinvigorating sales growth, Astra has pushed into higher-margin specialist treatment areas for cancers and rare diseases, which has boosted overall profitability.

The growth also means the company has more money to plough into its ‘R&D machine’, which Frikkee rates as the most effective of the big pharma players.

The group’s target of doubling revenue to $80bn by the end of the decade rests of the success of this ‘R&D machine’ and the second half will be a big test of its effectiveness as a number of major trial results are due. The risk of disappointments is reduced thanks to Astra having few big-selling drugs coming off patent until after 2030 while the diversity of the group’s portfolio of medicines means patent maturities are well spread out.

But if trial results are good in the second half of 2025 and Trump-related fears ease, Astra’s shares could richly reward their Elite backers’ show of faith.

[bountyhunter] 24/5/2025 18:27:05

Anyone interested in Elli Lilly?

[geckotheglorious] 13/5/2025 10:52:57

US drug prices artificially high for a variety of reasons.

One of which is US consumers/taxpayers subsidise same drugs at cheaper prices for poor nations.



A big change may soon be coming to the U.S. pharmaceutical market, where consumers pay exponentially more than any other country in the world. Due to the many players in the system, it has been hard to pin down an exact cause of the expenses or what to do about drug pricing, but there have been many attempts to change the status quo. The latest effort will come this morning, with many watching the developments, including Big Pharma and what it will mean for their shareholders.

Announcement: "In the White House, at 9:00 A.M., I will be signing one of the most consequential Executive Orders in our Country’s history," President Trump wrote on Truth Social. "Prescription Drug and Pharmaceutical prices will be REDUCED, almost immediately, by 30% to 80%. They will rise throughout the World in order to equalize and, for the first time in many years, bring FAIRNESS TO AMERICA! I will be instituting a MOST FAVORED NATION'S POLICY whereby the United States will pay the same price as the Nation that pays the lowest price anywhere in the World."

Many have pointed to the U.S. market as the one that covers the research and development costs for much of the globe, especially given drug companies' ability to dictate their listing prices. In most other nations, the government buys the stock of medicine for a country, so it is able to negotiate lower rates or bulk discounts, and can walk away from a deal based on "affordability and value." That rarely happens in the U.S., whose market is based on "access and availability." Private insurers will agree to nearly every deal, but just charge more.

Other differences: Direct-to-consumer marketing is allowed in the U.S. (bloating advertising expenses), while companies must make sure they keep prices inflated before patents expire and generics are released. Unlike other countries, there is also the existence of pharmacy benefit managers, referred to as "middlemen," who work for insurance companies and government agencies. PBMs attempt to bring down the cost of U.S. drugs by negotiating discounts and rebates, but they also take a percentage and have immense power over where a drug is placed on an insurer's formulary (tiers that classify how much a consumer vs. insurer has to pay for any given medicine). PBMs also won't release their "proprietary" rebate data publicly, which can influence costs, sales, and initial listing prices

[philanderer] 12/5/2025 19:08:10

Nice bounce back this afternoon.

[suetballs] 12/5/2025 10:06:30

wskill - quite right. Trump totally ignores WHY the prices are high.
Americans just want all the profits and none of the costs - a crazy way to operate.
Suet

[philanderer] 12/5/2025 09:25:06

As expected , Trump sending this one sub 10000p

[wskill] 12/5/2025 08:59:05

Not good AZN needs much higher pricing due to US courts awarding damages far beyond what is sensible and without proper science based evidence.
Should this come into law there will no longer be a profitable market for anyone except USA owned pharma companies.

Azn gets about 30% of revenue from the USA its the price that it sells at that counts and unfortunately its high in comparison to elsewhere in the world ,its not good for countries which cannot afford to pay more as the price they pay will rise to American price points.

[philanderer] 12/5/2025 01:03:15

WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump said he will sign an executive order that institutes a "most favored nation" policy for drug pricing, claiming the action will reduce prescription drug and pharmaceutical prices "almost immediately, by 30% to 80%."

The order, which he plans to sign at 9 a.m. ET on May 12 from the White House, would look to set prices of certain drugs covered by Medicare to the lowest level paid by comparable countries.

[undervaluedassets] 06/5/2025 09:30:07

Tariffs should not be too bad ..

Have huge manufacturing facilities in the US:-

17800 employees in the US.

17 research, development, manufacturing and commercial sites across the US.

9 billion doses of medicine produced in the US.

In November 2024 AZN announced a 3.5 billion investment to expand in US manufacturing research and development capabilities in the US

So in this crazy Trump-tariff world that we all find ourselves in AZN is well positioned.

[florenceorbis] 29/4/2025 08:23:19

AstraZeneca published its first Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures report, and its Sustainable use and sourcing of raw materials report.

Reporting calendar

The Company intends to publish its H1 and Q2 2025 results on 29 July 2025.

Conference call

A conference call and webcast for investors and analysts will begin today, 29 April 2025, at 11:45 UK time. Details can be accessed via astrazeneca.com.

[geckotheglorious] 28/4/2025 20:11:30

May be of interest to some....

Tempus AI Is Fueling Pharma's Race Toward Bespoke Foundation Models
By Nemo Marjanovic, PhD | @NMDespotARK
Research Analyst

Last week, Tempus AI signed1 a $200 million strategic partnership with AstraZeneca and Pathos AI to build a multimodal oncology foundation model. Tempus is contributing its valuable data repository—over 8 million de-identified patient records, including clinical notes, genomics, imaging, and transcriptomics. Fueled by this data, AstraZeneca’s foundation model should unlock new drug targets, accelerate therapeutic development, and drive personalized care.

This deal signals an important shift as pharma companies advance from adopting AI models to building them. In our view, every pharma/biotech giant will have to train and finetune their own models to address their respective pipelines and strategies—a transformation as fundamental as personalized medicine itself.

At roughly $25 per patient record—$13R11;$53 depending on data depth2—the economics of this deal highlight the value of richly-annotated, multimodal data. Notably, 8 million records will become just the starting point of a much larger corpus. Building a robust foundation model that captures disease complexity across populations is likely to require tens or even hundreds of millions of deeply phenotyped, multi-omic, longitudinal patient journeys.

The arms race for AI dominance in healthcare has begun. The pharma/biotech companies that control and capitalize on the deepest, richest data will win.

[geckotheglorious] 22/4/2025 19:01:24

Think its also to do with the Pharmacy benefit managers.
Everyone taking "a cut" in the chain.

US drug prices massively higher than same drug across border in Canada.

[suetballs] 22/4/2025 18:08:12

That’s a very valid point.
Suet

[wskill] 22/4/2025 17:42:41

Is part of the reason for high drug prices not the legal profession and courts in America awarding settlements which would have no merit in any other country.

[geckotheglorious] 22/4/2025 16:35:56

Trump reportedly weighing a move to cut U.S. drug prices to international levels


U.S. drug prices are the steepest in the world, standing about three times higher than those in other developed countries, an issue Trump has repeatedly pledged to address. In 2020, Trump's international reference pricing program was struck down by a federal judge.

3x higher...ridiculous

[danb45] 16/4/2025 09:55:57

Plootovrat…. exactly !! The old workface was better IMO

[gateside] 16/4/2025 08:40:09

I think the interface of the updated App is a big improvement. It also allows you to edit posts on the App too.The new graphs are not as clear to read, but they now extend more than the 3 years, which is much more useful.

[geckotheglorious] 16/4/2025 08:38:41

Trump targets Medicare price negotiations in new executive order

[plootocrat] 16/4/2025 08:34:24

DanB45 I can't imagine anyone would want to do research on ADVFN as the information provided, even something as straightforward as dividend history, is so frequently out of date or just plain wrong.

[danb45] 16/4/2025 00:15:39

am I on my own in hating the new ADFN layout, I don't want to research here I just want daily charts and stock prices. It appears ADFN is trying a new strategy to do far too much IMHO. Please ADVFN give users the option to flip to the old 'classic' layout ?????

[dudishes] 15/4/2025 12:18:14

G'day W,

Closed 10293.

Still cannot afford DG.PA!