Strong start for the year

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The year 2025 has started strongly with almost all business divisions reporting good growth. Nubeqa® continued to drive the growth of the Group and the Innovative Medicines business division. Both royalty income and product sales increased significantly from the comparison period

Published on 23 April 2025

"In January–March 2025, our net sales increased by 14.9 percent to EUR 354.6 (308.5) million and operating profit increased by 39.1 percent to EUR 77.9 (56.0) million. 

The year 2025 has started strongly with almost all business divisions reporting good growth. Nubeqa® continued to drive the growth of the Group and the Innovative Medicines business division. Both royalty income and product sales increased significantly from the comparison period. In addition, Nubeqa®'s product sales grew from the previous quarter and were at an all-time high so far.

In Branded Products, all therapy areas grew nicely. Starting from this reporting period, we will split the division's net sales by three therapeutic areas. Each therapy area's strategy is to build business around one key product group. In Respiratory, the key product group is Easyhaler® product portfolio, in CNS entacapone products and in Women's Health Divina® series.

Generics and Consumer Health and Animal Health business divisions also continued their growth path as expected in the first quarter of 2025. The decline in Fermion's external net sales from the comparison period is explained by the allocation of capacity more to internal use, as well as by timing of deliveries.

Operating profit grew again significantly faster than net sales, which is mostly explained by the growth of Nubeqa® royalties and product sales, but also by the good development of the rest of the business. The growth of Nubeqa® royalties was strong, especially considering the fact that, as usual, the previous quarter's product sales, which were very good at the end of 2024, have been deducted from the royalty. Operating expenses increased but were lower than we anticipated. Sales and marketing expenses were increased by, among other things, investments in the promotion of the Easyhaler® product portfolio, as well as the Japanese sales office established last year. The increase in research and development costs is explained by the progress of clinical development projects and the research portfolio, where the costs of biological medicines, in particular, increase significantly as they approach the clinical development stage.

US import tariffs continue to be a hot topic worldwide, and there is a lot of uncertainty around the topic right now. The United States is an important market for Orion, and we will, of course, follow the development of the situation closely. 

In March, we announced that Orion is establishing a new research & development centre in Cambridge, UK during 2025. With this we aim to accelerate our global growth strategy and the development of innovative medicines. The new centre will focus on the pharmaceutical development of new biological and large-molecule therapies.

Orion's own clinical development projects progressed as planned during the early part of the year. In addition, we have added to Orion's list of key clinical development projects a Phase 3 project, in which our partner Tenax develops oral levosimendan for the treatment of pulmonary hypertension in heart failure with preserved ejection fraction. Tenax has announced that it will increase the number of patients in the ongoing study and plans to start during 2025 a second phase III study which is aiming for global registration. With these advances, we felt the time was right to include Tenax Phase III projects with levosimendan in Orion's research pipeline. The original license agreement with Tenax (formerly Phyxius) was signed already in 2013.

All in all, the year 2025 has started very well and from here it is good to continue this year forward together with all Orionees and numerous partners.”