Obvious question for financial analysts: which firms make these drugs, and how important are those products to the company’s total revenue? 

Don’t worry — Calcbench figured it out for you!

Pharmaceutical firms are required to report annual sales of their blockbuster drugs as individual operating segments of the whole business. So we just took the list of drugs newly added to the Medicare Negotiation program, identified who sells them, and then looked up each drug’s individual revenue. The result is Table 1, below.

As you can see, some of the drugs are major revenue sources for their respective manufacture. Xifaxan, used to treat diarrhea, accounted for 20 percent of Bausch Cos.’ ($BHC) total sales in 2023; that’s a lot of exposure. 

Even more precarious is the position of Novo Nordisk ($NVO), which has three weight loss drugs (Ozempic, Weygovy, and Reybelsus) on the list, and altogether they accounted for a whopping 36 percent of Novo’s revenue in 2023.

What will the numbers look like for 2024? Ask us in a few weeks as the pharma firms start filing their annual reports. We’ll stay on it. 

To be clear, nobody yet knows what price the incoming Trump Administration will negotiate with the pharma companies on our list, or whether the Trump Administration will even bother negotiating at all. President-elect Trump has railed about the high price of drugs before, but the pharmaceutical industry has challenged the legality of the Medicare Negotiation Program in court and it’s not clear that the Trump Administration will bother to defend it.

Politics isn’t our thing here so we’ll have those questions alone. Still, right now, the addition of new drugs to the negotions list poses a significant new risk to Big Pharma firms. Calcbench can help you quickly identify and assess the size of that risk, so you can respond accordingly.