In the U.S. and Europe, basically five companies have successfully brought COVID-19 vaccines to market: Pfizer and BioNTech, AstraZeneca with the University of Oxford, Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen division, and Moderna. This is just a brief look at what happened to these company’s revenues from 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the following two years. Revenues are not necessarily profits. More analysis on profitability and where some of this money comes from will be included in future posts.
Pfizer and BioNTech have been broken out separately. For Johnson & Johnson, the numbers represent just one of the mammoth company’s units, Pharmaceuticals.
One thing becomes clearly obvious. COVID-19 vaccines have brought in an incredible amount of money for all of these companies. Pfizer’s sales basically doubled since 2019, BioTech’s went from only $117.53 million in 2019 to $20.52 billion in 2021. AstraZeneca went from $24.384 billion in 2019 to $37.417 billion in 2021, and J&J’s Pharma sales climbed from $42.198 billion to $52.080 billion. Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine is the company’s first commercial product (same as BioNTech). As a result, sales went from $60 million in 2019, which is basically for licensing fees, to $18.471 billion in 2021.
Pfizer
Revenue
2019 2020 2021
$40.905 billion $41.651 billion $81.288 billion
BioNTech
2019 2020 2021
$117.53 million (U.S.) $521.46 million (U.S.) $20.52 billion (U.S.)
AstraZeneca
2019 2020 2021
$24.384 billion (U.S.) $26.617 billion (U.S.) $37.417 billion (U.S.
J&J (Pharmaceutical Only)
2019 2020 2021
$42.198 billion $45.572 billion $52.080 billion
Moderna
2019 2020 2021
$60 million $803 million $18.471 billion
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