What to do with your stock in Gilead Sciences?
The Truvada disaster may affect the market
I will add very little commentary to this brief post; it speaks for itself. It’s all about the dolla dolla bills, y’all. (I live in Texas and am therefore required to say “y’all” at least monthly.)
It’s an article about stock values for Gilead Sciences, and I think it’s important that we know what is going on behind the scenes. The glossy picture certainly covers up the dark reality of the Truvada disaster.
Should You Buy, Hold, or Sell GILD Stock Ahead of Q1 Earnings?
Here’s just a snippet, which will be entirely unsurprising. (Emphasis mine.)
Gilead has a market-leading HIV franchise, led by flagship HIV therapies - Biktarvy and Descovy. Biktarvy sales and Descovy for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) have fueled GILD's top-line growth in the past several quarters.
However, the first quarter has likely seen a slowdown due to the impact of the new Medicare Part D model implementation. As per the new model, manufacturers now must provide discounts on the cost of drug for Medicare patients during the initial coverage and catastrophic phases. Secondly, the introduction of manufacturer discounts for people who qualify for the low-income subsidy program might have also had an adverse impact on HIV sales.
Since this population is disproportionately affected by HIV, GILD's HIV business must have suffered due to the larger cost-sharing obligations.
The top-line estimate for Biktarvy and Descovy is pegged at $3.2 billion and $479 million, respectively, and our model estimate for the same is pinned at $3.1 billion and $423.7 million.
It does seem as though they know that Gilead is potentially in some kind of trouble. It’s rather interesting to me that Truvada’s estimate is so much higher than Descovy’s—clearly, “bad Truvada” is more popular than “good Truvada.”
What do you think of this? I’d be shocked if any of my audience holds stock in Gilead, but you never know.
Am I misunderstanding this? The people who wrote that are trying to blame poor people using Medicare for the fact that their useless and toxic product is not yielding as much revenue as expected, because the monopolist is forced to sell at a "discounted" price.
The text is suggestive of a big financial flop in the making, and they are scapegoating months in advance from the event!
It's amazing the chutzpah of these people!
The war racket is a more honest form of fraud and extortion than the pharma racket.
“Biktarvy sales and Descovy for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP)”. For PrEP? I thought these were regular hiv drugs. This is continuing to get out of control. They’re just pushing the more expensive drugs for everything (generic Truvada/prep: $7,500/yr; Descovy: $30,000/yr; Biktarvy: $93,500/yr) - to increase their profits. The lies and greed don’t stop!