Amgen Q4 - Not Earth-Shattering But Life Saving

Earlier this week, Amgen released slightly boring full-year numbers. I suppose that's what you want from a drug company? In 2021 there wasn't much revenue growth due to competition pushing down the price of some of their key drugs. They aren't expecting much change for 2022 either, and the management team is guiding for a slight drop in revenue.

Even though they didn't have earth-shattering numbers, the stock still popped higher by 7%. This nice reprieve was due to a much-improved forecast announced by the management team. They revealed a plan to buy back shares to the value of $6 billion, in the current quarter alone. That's around 4% of the shares in issue; pretty heavy lifting for a three-month period.

Amgen now plans to grow revenues materially out to 2030, based on strong sales of drugs just emerging from their development pipeline, particularly in their biosimilar division. They also hope to return 60% of the net income to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks. That sounds pretty good, but a lot can happen in eight years, so we will take it one year at a time.