Core diagnostic growth offsets falling COVID-19 sales at Thermo Fisher

Original from: Medtechdive

• Thermo Fisher Scientific reported second quarter revenue of $10.97 billion as growing demand for immunodiagnostics and microbiology partly offset falling COVID-19 testing sales.
• As happened at Hologic, COVID-19 testing performed better than expected but still declined versus the prior year, causing revenue at the specialty diagnostics business to fall 11% on a reported basis.
• China was a bright spot for the COVID-19 diagnostic business, with Thermo Fisher’s support for local testing helping it to grow sales in the country by 20% in the second quarter.   

Thermo Fisher flagged China as a possible headwind going into the second quarter, reflecting the potential for lockdowns to hurt its business. However, China’s zero-COVID policies also benefited parts of the business, as Thermo Fisher CEO Marc Casper told investors on the quarterly results conference call. 

“A nice chunk of the overdrive in COVID testing was in supporting the local activities. We don’t sell our assays there, but we do sell our instruments and our reagents to support local demand. So, we had strong core growth and a meaningful response in China, actually larger than we typically have in China for COVID testing. The way I think about the outlook is, it should be a good market in the second half of the year. I have no doubt there will be some level of COVID disruption,” Casper said.

Source: Core diagnostic growth offsets falling COVID-19 sales atThermo Fisher