Even though Big Pharma has continued to be racked with the impact of colossal patent expirations, investors for the large part seem to be pretty unconcerned.
Take AstraZeneca (LSE: AZN), for example. Its share price has ballooned by more than 80% over the past five years even as the loss of exclusivity on revenue drivers like Crestor has pounded the bottom line.
Quite why the market remains upbeat isn’t a secret. Sure, a return to significant earnings growth may not have been achieved as early as many had been expecting. But the hard yards that the FTSE 100 firm has been putting in on the R&D front is finally starting to pay off.
The raft of product approvals over the past half a decade helped the sale of new medicines like Lynparza and Fasenra barge through the $1bn barrier in the first half of 2018. Even though the business has endured some development setbacks in recent years, the strength of its lab teams has still laid the groundwork for sales to rip higher once more.
Profits set to rebound
The rapid progression of AstraZeneca’s recently-launched products, and the encouraging progress seen across its bulging pipeline, clearly give plenty of reason to expect profits to explode sooner rather than later. The emphasis the firm’s putting on emerging markets gives me further grounds for optimism too.
Between January and June, sales to these developing regions rose 14% year-on-year, underpinned by exceptional medicines demand in China where AstraZeneca’s revenues leapt 33%. Sales were helped by the launch of lung cancer battler Tagrisso too, a product which drove total oncology product sales in the Chinese marketplace 57% higher from the same 2017 period.
City analysts expect the company to burst back into growth with a 12% rise in 2019. They may also be expecting dividends to remain frozen at 280 US cents per share through to then — a figure that yields a chubby, inflation-busting 3.7%, incidentally — but I’m confident that having turned the corner, dividends should follow profits higher again.
At current prices, AstraZeneca sports a forward P/E ratio of 22.5 times. Heady on paper, sure, but a figure that I still consider a snip given the rate at which the firm’s new medicines are flying off the shelves.
Testing titan
Intertek Group (LSE: ITRK) is another Footsie firm I believe contains millionaire-maker investment potential.
The inspection and product testing giant has a terrific record of lifting dividends and City analysts are not expecting the trend to end any time soon. Last year’s 71.3p per share payout is predicted to rise to 96p in 2018 and to 106.2p in the following 12-month period.
Subsequent yields of 2.1% and 2.4% for these years may not be anything to write home about. However, Intertek’s bright growth outlook (the City is anticipating further annual profits improvements of 1% this year and 9% next year), assisted by its insatiable appetite for acquisitions, mean that dividends should keep ripping higher for some time to come.
And this makes it one of the hottest income stocks on the FTSE 100, in my opinion. I’d happily buy Intertek alongside AstraZeneca despite its similarly-high paper valuation, a forward P/E multiple of 22.9 times, as the possibility of creating a million-dollar portfolio — along with some other choice stocks from the Footsie — with both or either is too good to miss.
