2022 was the year that diagnostics makers saw their previously sky-high COVID-19 test sales come crashing back down to earth—but the lucky ones were still able to eke out some overall revenue growth for the year.
Hopping on that bandwagon is Thermo Fisher Scientific, which watched its own COVID-related earnings plummet by more than 60% year over year. For 2022, according to an earnings report published Wednesday, the company took in $3.11 billion in COVID test sales, compared to the massive $9.23 billion that the segment brought in throughout the year before.
But that two-thirds drop didn’t send Thermo Fisher fully into the red. Instead, the testmaker pulled out total revenues of $44.92 billion for 2022, up about 15% from the $39.21 billion it earned in 2021.
“We had another exceptional year, exceeding our goals and delivering for all of our stakeholders in 2022,” said CEO Marc Casper. “Thanks to our incredible global team, we successfully executed our proven growth strategy, effectively navigated the macro-environment and delivered impressive financial results, as we continued to enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer.”
In past quarters, Thermo Fisher has attributed much of its financial success to a bullish M&A strategy. Chief among its recent buys is the blockbuster purchase of contract research organization PPD, which cost a whopping $17.4 billion and was completed in the final days of 2021. According to this week’s earnings report, the CRO has now been almost fully integrated into the company and is on its way toward bringing in total synergies of $175 million by its third year under the Thermo Fisher umbrella.
More recently, the medtech made another multibillion-dollar purchase, offering up $2.6 billion last fall for The Binding Site, a U.K.-based maker of diagnostic tests and instruments to help detect and monitor certain cancers and other illnesses. That acquisition closed in the first week of this year.
Still, despite its overall revenue growth, Thermo Fisher saw virtually no change—in either direction—for its organic revenues, which exclude the impacts of the company’s acquisitions and of changes in foreign exchange rates.
It also reported a drop in its total profits: For 2022, Thermo calculated $6.95 billion in net income, compared to about $7.73 billion the prior year, which comes out to a decline of about 10%.
As Thermo Fisher now dives headfirst into 2023, Casper said it is “incredibly well positioned” for the year—though the company is taking a rather conservative view in its forecasts.
This year, Thermo Fisher is expecting to rake in revenues of $45.3 billion, which would represent less than 1% of year-over-year growth. That number also allows for core organic revenue growth of 7%—a figure that excludes COVID-related earnings and the impact of all acquisitions other than that of PPD, which reached 14% growth in 2022.