Danish drugmaker Lundbeck saw its finances slide into the red for the second quarter of the year after restructuring charges placed a heavy drag on performance.
The group posted a second-quarter loss of 85 million Danish kroner ($14 million), a far cry away from the 797 million kroner profit it booked for the year-ago period, after taking a substantial hit from a 500-million kroner restructuring charge.
Also pulling down its bottom line was a 13% drop in sales for the period, which came in at 3.56 billion kroner.
The shortfall was driven by a 5% drop in turnover of mood disorder drug Cipralex (escitalopram) to 1.46 billion kroner, while a 75% plunge in US sales of the medicine, where it is sold as Lexapro by Forest Laboratories, was caused by the loss of its patent there.
Elsewhere, sales of the Alzheimer's disease drug Ebixa (memantine) slipped 2% to 696 million kroner, primarily because of a 17% price cut in France in March this year.
On the upside, Xenazine (tetrabenazine), for the treatment of chorea associated with Huntington’s disease, pulled in sales of 277 million kroner, marking an increase of 32% over the same period last year, while Sabril (vigabatrin) for the treatment of refractory complex partial seizures and infantile spasms, grew 13% to 90 million kroner. Lundbeck holds US rights for both drugs.
Despite its venture into the red the company said it is on track to hit its full-year targets, and remained upbeat about its near-term prospects.
For 2012, Lundbeck expects revenues of 14.5-15.2 billion kroner, although it noted that the result is now likely to be in the lower end of the guided range, because of "increasing pressure from health care reforms primarily in Europe".
Pleasing results
"We are pleased with the overall results for the first half of the year and the process of renewing our product portfolio," said the firm's president and chief executive Ulf Wiinberg.
"Already in 2012, revenue from new products is expected to exceed the lost revenue from Lexapro US," he noted, adding that the company is now "looking forward to the filing of our multimodal antidepressant vortioxetine in North America and Europe and aripiprazole depot in the EU".
Under the restructuring plans announced in June, designed to create "a more flexible commercial infrastructure with respect to detailing to general practitioners ahead of multiple future product launches and partly to maintain cost control", Lundbeck said it would trim its workforce by about 600 positions, primarily in Europe, during this year.
