Novartis raises full-year guidance on Q1 beat, drug sales

Shares of Novartis (NVS) are soaring in Tuesday's pre-market trading session — holding onto steady gains into the market open — after the Swiss pharmaceutical giant reported better-than-expected first-quarter earnings and raised its full-year guidance. The robust financial performance was driven primarily by strong sales of the company's innovative heart failure and psoriasis treatment drugs.

Yahoo Finance Health Reporter Anjalee Khemlani breaks down the details.

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This post was written by Angel Smith

Video transcript

BRAD SMITH: Let's talk a little. Novartis shares rising today after the company beat the Street's expectations for its first quarter and boosted its forward earnings guidance. To break down what this means for investors, we've got Yahoo Finance reporter Anjalee Khemlani here with us in studio.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: That's right. Yeah, so a really good story for Novartis which is doing something different from other pharma companies. The Swiss company looking at its core focus groups, its four core areas, including driving demand from its heart failure drug Entresto, as well as the psoriasis drug Cosentyx that made up about maybe 2 or 4-- nearly $4 billion actually in the earnings.

And so that's really a strong growth story for the company, which has been moving in a different path than sort of other companies where we've seen them get into buzzy spaces like ACDs and like GLP-1s. Novartis has specifically said that it is moving into areas that it knows it has an opportunity. And they're clearly proving that, even with the spin off of Sandoz that got completed at the end of last year. They're able to maintain the growth and beat earnings estimates.

And meanwhile, also looking at what they're doing in the manufacturing space, the company has indicated that it is paying close attention to the discussions about policies related to biologics in China that are coming out of DC. And they're looking at ways to maneuver around that. So that's going to be an interesting story to watch on that front. So we'll be staying tuned to that. We've seen that CEO Vas Narasimhan has been really focused on all these other areas and really taking the company into a different direction than you would see otherwise.