Biotech Values

[Rocky3]

GILD did not know until very recently—when seeing the FDA label and WAC price for Mavyret—how severe the threat was going to be.

They surely knew that it was going to be a significant threat - the '17 guidance at the beginning of the year showed that. The announced pricing was an additional matter, but mostly showed what an uphill battle it is going to be for $ABBV given the reduced size of the market and existing contracts. Even if its gets 30% market share for NRx, its TRx market share will be much less, and now the total dollar volume of the market will be much less thanks to more price competition.

It will be interesting to see what the uptake for both Mavyret and Vos will be. Epclucsa had a very strong uptake. Zepatier was much slower. For the 4 weeks to date, Vos is around one-half of the Zepatier uptake - not very impressive.

I am still surprised that Daklinza has any sales, but it does.

Since the overall market continues to contract (even before Mavyret's 8 week product), the WW HCV market in '18 will be much smaller, but maybe not as small as was feared in early '17 when the market was falling even further. I expect $GILD HCV sales to be down very much in '18, thanks to both price competition and market share loss. Its only hope would be for meaningful China sales, and I am not expecting much there.