With European countries -- Spain and Greece in particular -- cutting drug spending to help balance their budgets and the dollar strengthening against the euro, many drug companies' revenue will be hurt.
But Novartis (NYSE: NVS ) shrugged that off Thursday, reporting sales that increased 11% compared with the year-ago quarter. Its strong first-half results drove the company to increase its sales guidance for the year.
It's a good start to the pharma earnings season, but I'm not sure if it should be seen as a prediction for Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ ) , Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY ) , and Eli Lilly (NYSE: LLY ) , which all report next week. Novartis has a couple of unique things going for it.
Part of the sales increase was because of accelerated growth at Novartis' generic-drug division, Sandoz, where sales were up 11% in the second quarter. That might bode well for Teva Pharmaceutical (Nasdaq: TEVA ) and Mylan (Nasdaq: MYL ) , but it's not going to help domestic brand-name drugmakers.
At Novartis' pharmaceutical division, sales rose 8% thanks in large part to new products, which now make up 21% of brand-name drug sales. If you just look at drugs launched since 2007, sales were up 43% year over year. It's hard to compare that with other drugmakers because they typically don't break out sales of new drugs. Perhaps because they don't have a reason to tout their innovation?
Novartis isn't without its faults, however. It'll lose two blockbusters -- blood pressure drug Diovan and cancer drug Gleevec -- to generic competition in 2012. It's also fighting with minority shareholders of Alcon (NYSE: ACL ) , in which it's buying a majority stake from Nestle. Neither the option of increasing the offer to make them shut up nor fighting it out in court sounds all that appealing.
Overall, though, Novartis' good qualities outweigh its bad ones, and the company is worthy of further investigation.
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