JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) -South African drugmaker Aspen Pharmacare on Wednesday reported a 15% drop in interim profit, citing inflationary pressures, supply chain issues and a drop in COVID vaccine sales.
Its headline earnings per share, a profit measure widely used in South Africa, was at 660 cents for the half year that ended Dec. 31, down from 777.2 cents in the year-ago period.
Despite a tough economic environment, Aspen maintained its guidance that its results for the second half will be better than the corresponding period a year before and will surpass the first half, it said.
Its revenue for the half year fell by a percentage point to 19.2 billion rand ($1.06 billion).
Aspen has been on investors’ radar primarily because its COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing plant in South Africa has failed to get any vaccine orders from African countries for a year, forcing it to re-purpose its capacity for other products.
“We anticipate contribution of R2 billion (billion rand) utilising this capacity in calendar year 2024, increasing to R4 billion in calendar year 2025,” it said in a statement.
($1 = 18.1530 rand)
(Reporting by Promit Mukherjee, Editing by Louise Heavens and Barbara Lewis)
