The pharmaceutical company Biontech increased its sales in the first half of the year by 30.1 percent to 9.57 billion euros compared to the first half of 2021. Net profit increased by 37.2 percent to 5.37 billion euros, as the company announced on Monday in Mainz.
Looking at the second quarter alone, however, there was a decline in both sales (down 39.8 percent to 3.20 billion) and profit (down 40.0 percent to 1.67 billion) compared to the same period last year. The corona vaccine manufacturer attributed this to the fact that the dynamic development of the pandemic "leads to a postponement of orders and thus to fluctuations in quarterly sales". The company confirmed its forecast for the full year 2022 with Covid-19 vaccine sales of 13 to 17 billion euros.
Biontech announced that a clinical trial of a vaccine matched to Omicron variants BA.4 and BA.5 will begin this month. If the responsible authorities approve this, the first doses could be delivered from October. Biontech had previously developed a vaccine adapted to the BA.1 variant. The EU medicines agency EMA started the test procedure for this vaccine from the manufacturers Biontech and Pfizer in mid-June. The EMA is also testing an adapted vaccine from the US manufacturer Moderna, which, like the vaccine from Biontech/Pfizer, is based on mRNA technology. So far, no vaccine has been approved in the EU that also targets variants of the corona virus.
