Rovi forms part, together with Grifols, of that small but constant group of Ibex companies dedicated to laboratories and pharmaceutical activity. This particular summit of listed companies by means of a molecule and innovation is completed by Almirall and Pharmamar, which have also made their inroads into the selective and are already operating in a new post-pandemic scenario. Three years after the covid confined a large part of the world population to their homes, Spanish pharmaceutical companies have returned to normality and Rovi is no exception.
“This year is marked by a post-pandemic context”, is the message transmitted from the company. When talking about 2023, they say that it is “different” and “transitional”. The covid is going to become a “seasonal diseaseâ€. End of a historic stage in which companies like Rovi have lived up to it: Moderna chose it to manufacture its vaccine outside the United States.
For Rovi, the time has come to bet on new products, promote internationalization and continue making its way in manufacturing for third parties thanks, among other things, to the agreement with Moderna, which goes beyond the covid and has a duration of ten years. The Spanish company’s facilities in Madrid may be used to service future mRNA vaccines from the American company.
Last year, Rovi’s profit increased by 30% and stood at 199 million euros, while revenue, of 820 million, registered an increase of 26% and touched something like the peak that ends the years of the pandemic. . Added to the success of participating in the fight against covid was a strong demand for heparin, used to prevent and break up blood clots.
Now comes what the company itself describes as a “turning point”: in the first quarter of this year, turnover has fallen by 2% and for the whole of 2023 the forecast is that it will do so between 10% and 15%. It is time to reorient a business structure of almost 2,000 employees that has placed its products in more than one hundred countries. And looking for opportunities.
The new orientation will be one of the elements of greatest interest to shareholders at the meeting on June 14. “We are in a transformation process that will allow us not only to internationalize the company and reposition it towards products with higher added value, but also to increase production capacity,” says the president of the company, Juan López-Belmonte Encina, in a letter to shareholders.
One of the “growth engines” in post-pandemic times will be the heparin division, which last year accounted for 32% of revenue and is currently experiencing strong growth. Rovi has two products, Bemiparin and Enoxaparin, with which it aspires to become one of the world leaders.
Another of the shocks has to do with innovations through its own drug development platform called ISM. It has two products in development, Risperidone and Letrozole, dedicated to the treatment of schizophrenia and breast cancer, in which Rovi expects to make progress this year.
The third front is that of production for third parties. Big global pharma tends to outsource some of the activity, creating a global market with prospects for 7% annual growth through 2027, according to a GlobeNewswire report.
Rovi has high esteem after the agreement with Moderna and is convinced that he will have more opportunities. It already manufactures 280 million syringes, 100 million vials, 3,000 million tablets and 30 million sachets for third parties. A whole deployment that last year contributed 49% of sales.
There is also interest in alliances. The most recent of these was closed at the end of last year with the Catalan meat group Cà rniques Celrà and with the Aragonese agri-food company Costa Food Group and its objective is self-supply of heparins.
