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wolf1moon t1_izyei3u wrote

Reply to comment by avengerintraining in [OC] Visualising Pfizer's latest income statement. Pharmaceutical profit margins are notoriously higher than most other industries by giteam

It's expensive but it's still no where near a major cost and almost certainly bucketed into r&d. Otherwise you'd see it there. Besides, they buy up smaller companies that have already done it so they don't have to.

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Xdsin t1_izygjjg wrote

This assumes that the R&D is successful.

What would this look like if their mRNA vaccine failed or more competitors beat them to the punch?

You also have them responding to a Pandemic. Which would make their returns on investment higher.

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QuizardNr7 t1_j00o868 wrote

not their mRNA vaccine - that would be Biontech - Pfizer afaik did the heavy lifting in production.

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[deleted] t1_izz5jum wrote

A lot of their R&D isn’t reported here, it’s on the balance sheet

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wolf1moon t1_j00ia3d wrote

A balance sheet is a statement of assets and liabilities. They mean two fundamentally different things.

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[deleted] t1_j00ik50 wrote

If you look at their 10-Q, a lot of their in-process R&D this year came from acquisitions, which are capitalized on the balance sheet and them amortized over 15 years

Also, any foreign R&D they have abides by foreign reporting rules, in which development costs are also capitalized

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wolf1moon t1_j00n4ix wrote

That makes sense they would capitalize it, but the amortization is still a tiny percentage. There's no way to slice this that isn't very little money spent on r&d compared to the profits. I used to work health care supply chain and r&d was never a major expense. The selling costs including buying employees boats to take doctors out on "as friends" because it didn't count as bribery if you didn't give the doctor the boat directly. Crazy shit

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