
Moderna lowers 2025 sales forecast by $1 billion

The headquarters of Moderna Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, on Tuesday, March 26, 2024.
Adam Glanzman | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Modern on Monday lowered its 2025 revenue forecast by about $1 billion due to some potential headwinds later this year as the biotech company continues to cut costs and expand its portfolio.
Moderna now expects sales of between $1.5 billion and $2.5 billion for 2025, most of which will occur in the second half of the year. The majority of these sales will come from Moderna’s Covid vaccination and newly launched respiratory syncytial virus vaccine, according to a press release.
The forecast is below the $2.5 billion to $3.5 billion forecast previously made in September. At the time, the company said it expected to break even on an operating cash basis in 2028 – up from 2026 – with revenue of $6 billion.
Shares of Moderna closed nearly 17% lower on Monday. Other vaccine stocks also fell, with Novavax and BioNTech both closing more than 7% lower.
“As we head into 2025, there are a handful of uncertainties that we must expect,” Moderna CFO Jamey Mock told CNBC. “From this period onwards we expect that there will be headwinds. It could be a tailwind, but at the moment we see it as a headwind.”
Mock pointed to four factors that could weigh on sales, including increasing competition in the Covid market. He said Moderna’s share of the U.S. retail market for Covid vaccinations fell to 40% at the end of 2024 from 48% in 2023 and the company was preparing for another decline this year.
He noted Sanofi is commercialized together NovavaxUnder a new agreement, it will be possible to market the Covid vaccine worldwide, which could potentially make this vaccine more competitive.
Mock said the second factor was declining vaccination rates, which fell about 7% overall in the U.S. retail market in fall 2024 compared to the same point in 2023. The final two factors, he said, are the timing of manufacturing contracts with a handful of countries and uncertainty about what Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisers will recommend for an RSV revaccination.
However, Mock noted that the company expects to reduce cash costs by $1 billion in 2025, with another $500 million in cost reductions planned for 2026.
“We are taking the right amount of costs to preserve our liquidity,” Mock said. “We are excited to invest in and diversify our portfolio.”
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The announcement comes as Moderna charts a path forward following a rapid decline in demand for its Covid vaccine, the only commercially available product until the RSV shot came onto the market last year. It also comes ahead of Moderna’s presentation at the annual JPMorgan Healthcare Conference, one of the largest gatherings of healthcare executives in the world and a hotbed of dealmaking in the industry.
Revenue from Moderna’s two shots was in line with its 2024 forecast and came in at about $3 billion to $3.1 billion. In November, the company said its updated Covid shot had benefited from being approved in the US three weeks earlier than the previous version of the shot in 2023.
Still, those sales represent a significant decline from the $6.7 billion that Moderna’s Covid shot brought in in 2023 and the $18 billion it brought in in 2022, as fewer people up the sleeves rolled up to receive updated vaccinations.
Moderna plans to expand its portfolio with ten new product approvals over the next three years, including a combination vaccination against Covid and the flu and a “next generation” Covid vaccination. The company said Monday that it could receive three approvals in 2025 alone.
The company is betting on a pipeline based on its messenger RNA platform, the technology used in its Covid vaccine and RSV shot.