From five years of sales declines to nine consecutive quarters of growth, it’s hard to deny that Teva’s revamp under CEO Richard Francis is paying off.
Now, following the completion of the strategy’s first phase—which focused on restoring the company to growth—Teva is detailing plans to accelerate that momentum over the next two years and beyond.
By 2030, Teva now expects to achieve at least $5 billion in innovative medicine sales, building on top of a previously stated goal to hit a range of $3.5 billion to $4 billion in branded drug revenue by 2027.
Leading the commercial charge will be Austedo in Huntington’s disease and tardive dyskinesia (TD), Ajovy for migraine prevention and Teva’s schizophrenia newcomer Uzedy. Collectively, the trio of drugs brought home around $2.3 billion in sales last year.
Meanwhile, Teva’s late-stage pipeline is well stocked with assets carrying blockbuster sales expectations, positioning the company for “launch on launch on launch” over the coming years, Francis said during Teva’s Innovation & Strategy Day on May 30.
Alongside those innovative ambitions, Teva will continue to prioritize its generic and biosimilar operations while streamlining other areas of its business, especially around manufacturing, to save some $700 million in costs.
Blockbuster brigade
Teva’s plan (PDF) to reach $5 billion in 2030 innovative drug sales places the greatest emphasis on Austedo, which the company foresees hitting at least $2.5 billion in 2027 before reaching a projected revenue peak of $3 billion, Chris Fox, Teva’s executive vice president of U.S. commercial, said during Thursday’s event.
Fox noted that Austedo sales hit an “inflection point” in 2024, largely driven by the approval of a once-a-day pill formulation, Austedo XR, the previous year. The debut of the new extended release Austedo format “unlocked a lot of trapped value and allowed us to invest more,” Fox explained.
Over the same period, Teva also launched a TD awareness campaign, sought to deepen patient access, rolled out an impact registry and established patient service offerings to improve Austedo’s standing in the market, Fox added.
While Austedo is faring well, there is still tremendous potential to grow in TD, which Teva estimates affects around 785,000 people living in the U.S. Of that projected patient pool, only 15% or so are diagnosed, and just 6% of those patients are treated with a vesicular monoamine transporter 2 inhibitor (VMAT2i) like Austedo, Fox explained.
As for how Teva plans to keep Austedo growing, continued TD education pushes targeting patients, doctors and their staff will be key, Fox said.
Beyond Austedo, Teva is growing increasingly confident in its schizophrenia franchise, currently spearheaded by its long-acting injectable formulation of the antipsychotic risperidone, Uzedy, which won FDA approval in April 2023.
The company is taking the same approach that won Uzedy its green light by developing a long-acting formulation of another well-established schizophrenia drug, olanzapine, which Teva plans to submit to the FDA for review in the second half of the year.
Should olanzapine pass muster at the FDA, Teva could have a “best-in-class LAI franchise” on its hands, with the potential to reel in a collective $1.5 billion to $2 billion in peak sales, Fox said.
Aside from olanzapine, Teva’s biggest late-stage pipeline darling is duvakitug, which the company plans to submit for approval in inflammatory bowel disease around 2029. Teva is currently forecasting $2 billion to $5 billion in peak sales for duvakitug, which is being co-developed with French drugmaker Sanofi.
Teva has also pinned blockbuster sales hopes on late-stage assets in asthma, celiac disease and multiple system atrophy.
Revving up the ‘powerhouse’
Despite Teva’s newfound emphasis on innovative R&D, the company isn’t about to abandon its generic and biosimilar roots.
“There are three things you need to be brilliant at to win in generics,” Richard Daniell, Teva’s EVP of European commercial, said at the Innovation Day event. He boiled down the secret sauce at Teva to a “great portfolio that customers value,” combined with a strong commercial base and efficient supply network.
Teva’s “generics powerhouse,” as the company refers to it, doesn’t just comprise copycat small molecules, but also includes biosimilars and a billion-dollar over-the-counter business.
Now, after returning the division to stability, Teva has “considerable opportunity” to ramp up its biosimilar business, dive deeper into OTC and further diversify the distribution of its small-molecule generics.
One major piece of Teva’s plan is to gradually reduce its dependence on U.S. generics sales, Daniell noted. The U.S. market contributed to 33% of the company’s generic sales in 2024, but Teva is hoping to whittle that number down to roughly 25% by 2027.
Looking forward, Teva is plotting around 15 complex generic and five biosimilar launches through 2027, with Daniell asserting that the biosimilar business could more than double its revenue in the next two years.
Teva first rolled out its so-called “Pivot to Growth” strategy in May 2023, just a few short months after Francis took the reins at the then-struggling Israeli drugmaker. At the time, Teva had endured five straight years of annual sales declines, prompting a CEO switch and an overhaul at the company.
At the time—and again during Thursday’s event—Francis stressed that the plan rests upon four pillars: maximizing the value of growth drivers like Austedo; bulking up in innovative R&D; maintaining and building its generics business; and focusing the company through strategic capital allocation and the divestment of its active pharmaceutical ingredient business.
While the API sale is still a work in progress, Teva has delivered on each of those other goals, while acknowledging that there’s still more work to be done. Under Francis’ stewardship, Teva has subsequently achieved nine consecutive quarters of sales growth.
For the first three months of 2025, Teva posted $3.9 billion in global sales, marking a 5% increase in constant currencies over 2024’s first quarter.
“I think we can safely say we have returned to growth,” Francis said of the company’s progress Thursday. “We’ve changed the direction of Austedo, we’ve rejuvenated Ajovy and we’ve launched Uzedy.”
From the jump, Francis made it clear that he wanted Teva to grow beyond its bread-and-butter generics business and establish itself as a leading innovative drugmaker, too. Now, with the work done over the past two years, “a world class biopharma company is emerging,” the CEO asserted.