Moderna lowers its sales forecast for 2025 by $1 billion

modern on Monday lowered its 2025 sales guidance 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 2025 revenue of between $1.5 billion and $2.5 billion, most of which will come in the second half of the year. The majority of those sales will come from Moderna's Covid vaccine and the recently launched respiratory syncytial virus vaccine, according to a statement.

The guidance is lower than a previous forecast range of $2.5 billion to $3.5 billion issued in September. At the time, the company said it expected to break even in terms of operating cash in 2028, lagged from 2026, with $6 billion in revenue.

Moderna shares opened Monday down 20%. Other vaccine stocks also fell, with Novavax falling 6% in early trading and BioNTech falling 4%.

“As we approach 2025, we are planning for a handful of uncertainties,” Moderna CFO Jamey Mock told CNBC. “As of this period, we are planning for them to be headwinds. They could be tailwinds, but now we see them as headwinds.”

Mock pointed to four factors that could affect sales, including increased competition in the Covid market. He said Moderna's share of the US retail market for Covid shots fell to 40% at the end of 2024 from 48% in 2023, and the company is bracing for another drop this year.

He noticed sanafi will co-market NovavaxCovid vaccine around the world under a new agreement, which could potentially make that vaccine more competitive.

Mock said the second factor is falling vaccination rates, which declined about 7% overall in the US retail market in the fall of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023. The last two factors are the moment around manufacturing contracts with a handful of countries and uncertainty. about what Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisors will recommend for RSV revaccination.

But Mock noted that the company expects to reduce cash cost expenses in 2025 by $1 billion, with plans for additional cost reductions of $500 million in 2026.

“We are taking on the right amount of costs to preserve our cash,” Mock said. “We are excited to invest and diversify our portfolio.”

The announcement comes as Moderna charts a path forward after rapidly declining demand for its Covid vaccine, its only commercially available product until its RSV vaccine entered the market last year. It also comes ahead of Moderna's presentation at the JPMorgan Healthcare Annual Conference, one of the largest gatherings of healthcare executives in the world and a hotbed of deal activity for the industry.

Revenue from Moderna's two vaccines met its 2024 forecast, reaching between $3 billion and $3.1 billion. In November, the company said its updated Covid vaccine benefited from gaining approval in the US three weeks earlier than the previous version of the vaccine in 2023.

Still, those sales represent a sharp drop from the $6.7 billion Moderna's Covid shot booked in 2023 and the $18 billion it generated in 2022, as fewer people rolled up their sleeves to get updated shots.

Moderna plans to bolster its portfolio with the approval of 10 new products over the next three years, including a combination vaccine targeting Covid and flu and a “next-generation” Covid vaccine. The company said Monday it could get three approvals in 2025 alone.

The company is betting on a project built around its messenger RNA platform, which is the technology used in its Covid vaccine and its RSV vaccine.