Roche company focus: expectations turn from replacing biosimilar losses to dwarfing them

For the last five years or so, the narrative around the Swiss pharma giant Roche (ROG: SIX) has been about a company that is likely to be hit harder than any other by the arrival of biosimilars, as they will ferociously erode sales from key products.

While it is obvious that the biosimilar impact will be enormous, Roche has been trying to move the conversation on to optimism about the strength of its pipeline and convince shareholders that it can do much better than just replace lost revenues as its big-selling cancer biologics Herceptin (trastuzumab), Avastin (bevacizumab) and MabThera/Rituxan (rituximab) lose patent exclusivity.

A table presented at the Roche Pharma Day 2019 showed that this optimism is based around more than blind faith.