Moderna issues letter to shareholders; believes company will experience sales growth in 2025 (99.45)
- "A Year of Transition: In 2023, SARS-CoV-2 continued to evolve. The virus that causes COVID-19 is clearly here to stay—just like influenza. Our business has also adapted to a more predictable, seasonal endemic market. Managing the transition took significant effort in 2023. As you know, we rapidly scaled our manufacturing capabilities during the pandemic to play a critical role in combatting COVID-19 with our vaccine. We knew that this surge capacity may not be required in the endemic market, but we felt obligated to ensure we protected as many lives as we could during the pandemic. During 2023, it became clear that demand for vaccines had entered a new stage of the endemic setting and we pivoted to significantly resize our manufacturing infrastructure to help ensure our COVID-19 franchise would be profitable in 2024 and beyond. Although undervaccination has been observed in the first endemic season, we believe this will settle out over the coming years as the impact of the virus and vaccine during endemic periods becomes evident and may affect future levels of vaccination.
- In parallel, we prepared for the potential 2024 launch of our investigational RSV vaccine for adults, which is expected to further strengthen our financial position and further demonstrate the commercial potential of our mRNA platform. We believe our RSV vaccine candidate has a potentially best-in-class profile based on clinical trial data and ready-to-use pre-filled syringes when compared to two recently launched products. In addition, the mRNA vaccine technology that our RSV vaccine uses has a well-established safety and tolerability profile, having been used in more than a billion COVID-19 vaccine doses.
- Looking Ahead: Our focus for 2024 and 2025 is to drive sales growth and profitability. To achieve that, we are focusing on three priorities. Priority one is commercial execution. Our recent market share gain in the U.S. demonstrates that we can compete with large established players. We expect COVID sales to stabilize in a fully endemic market, and we will build on our current momentum to grow our market share for Spikevax in 2024. To support this, we made the decision at the end of 2023 to flatten our commercial organization to help us accelerate decisions and increase customer understanding as we prepare for multiple product launches. With the expected launch of our RSV vaccine candidate in 2024, and potential launch of our flu/COVID combination vaccine as early as 2025, we believe Moderna will experience sales growth in 2025. Priority two is disciplined investment. We will continue to review our manufacturing costs, product pipeline, and deliver efficiencies. Our upcoming respiratory product launches in 2024 and 2025 will also achieve efficiencies from a growing pipeline."