Moderna: Maintaining Our $227 Fair Value Estimate After Digesting Pfizer’s COVID-19 Guidance

We're maintaining our $227 fair value estimate for Moderna after reviewing Pfizer's lowered 2024 guidance for its own COVID-19 vaccine. Pfizer gave guidance for $5 billion in 2024 sales of Pfizer/BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine, which is materially lower than our prior Pfizer forecast as well as Pfizer's $11.5 billion guidance for 2023 COVID-19 vaccine revenue. We continue to expect a tougher market for these vaccines going forward as the U.S. and some smaller markets transition from large, government contracts to commercial sales based on demand. However, we're comfortable with our Moderna assumptions, which call for another significant drop in COVID-19 revenue in 2024 to $3.9 billion, followed by a smaller drop to $3.5 billion in 2025 as some international contracts could wind down further. We then assume modest 3%-4% annual COVID-19 vaccine sales growth for Moderna following the expected launch of the firm's COVID-19/flu combination vaccine in 2025.