Bristol-Myers Squibb Q3 Earnings: What Investors Should Know

Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY 1.30%) is a pharmaceutical company with a wide range of therapeutic products, targeting everything from cardiovascular disease to cancer. In this Backstage Pass video, which was recorded on Oct. 27, 2021, Motley Fool contributor Rachel Warren dives into Bristol-Myers' third-quarter earnings results. Fool contributor Brian Withers is also in the clip.

Rachel Warren: For anyone who maybe isn't familiar with this company, Bristol-Myers Squibb is one of the oldest pharmaceutical companies around. The company develops medicines across the range of therapeutic areas from oncology, to cardiovascular, to immunology. It's one of those quintessential value stocks.

It also pays a dividend that yields about 3.4% last I checked. The company isn't generally known for super high quarter-over-quarter or year-over-year earnings growth, but I think investors were very curious to see what the quarter had in store. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen here really quick, and then present my slide. Wait a second while that loads.

Brian Withers: Looks great.

Rachel Warren: There we go. [laughs] Just a quick note here. As you guys can see, Bristol-Myers is not generally a market beating stock. It's had moments where it's surpassed the S&P 500's return, but it generally trails a little bit behind the market. I think usually the reason investors like the stock is that it's a steady and stable dividend. Bristol-Myers reported their third quarter earnings this morning.

Overall, it was a good quarter. They did beat analyst expectations albeit by slim margin. Analysts were projecting a non-gap earnings per share of $1.91. You can see down here the company actually beat that slightly at $2.00. Also notably, analysts were projecting the company would report revenue of $11.55 billion. The company came in just above that, at $11.62 billion, which was a double-digit percentage increase on a year-over-year basis for their revenue.

The company had similar rates of growth from both it's U.S. segment as well as its international segment. As you can see here, U.S. revenue alone grew 12% year-over-year, and international revenue was up 8% year-over-year.

The company continues to derive a very significant portion of its revenues from three key drugs, these are the blood thinner Eliquis, and then cancer drugs Revlimid and Opdivo, and a few of these it acquired in it's Celgene acquisition back in 2019. Those three drugs alone, Eliquis, revenue from that drug was up 15% in the quarter, Revlimid 11%, and Opdivo 7%.

Earnings-per-share according to GAAP was actually down, that was the only really somewhat negative note from this quarterly report. Then interestingly, non-GAAP EPS was actually up 23% year-over-year.

Net income was positive, but was down slightly compared to the year-ago period. The company actually decreased it's GAAP EPS guidance, but it increased its non-GAAP EPS guidance for the year. So a little bit of positive news, a little bit of not so positive news.

Again, not huge jump in its forecast here. An increase non-GAAP EPS guidance to be in the range of $7.40 to $7.55 per share for the full year 2021. Again, that upper number is the same, so it raised its lower range. Then, it decreased GAAP EPS guidance slightly. The company is still projecting the full-year revenue growth and the high single-digits, which is pretty much normal for the company.

All in all, not a blow it out of the ballpark quarter, but not a bad one either I think there were a lot of things to like from this report. I like the fact that its revenue growth was so strong that US international revenues were neck and neck there and that it is continuing to see really strong growth from its top filling medicines while also cultivating its pipeline. All in all, I think it was a pretty good quarter.