Even as Roche executives on Thursday espoused confidence in the company’s resilience and growth potential over the next several years, a mix of exchange rate fluctuations and lackluster pharmaceutical sales led to a worse-than-expected third quarter for the Swiss drug giant.
For the first nine months of 2025, Roche’s overall sales grew 7% year over year at constant currencies to 45.9 billion Swiss francs (nearly $58 billion), the company announced Thursday. The bulk of that growth can be attributed to the company’s pharmaceutical division, which has clocked sales growth of 9% at constant exchange rates over the nine-month stretch.
As in previous earnings periods, Roche’s pharma momentum was attributed to the recent performance of Phesgo, Xolair, Hemlibra, Vabysmo and Ocrevus.
Roche’s earnings release reported the company’s sales performance from January through September, and in that span, all five of those franchises charted revenue increases. But looking at the period from July through September specifically, that shine lost some of its luster.
The company’s third-quarter group sales—which also include the performance of Roche’s diagnostics unit—landed at 14.9 billion francs (around $19 billion), down a little over 1% from the same period in 2024, analysts at ODDO BHF wrote in a note to clients Thursday.
Pharmaceutical sales were also down slightly for the quarter, with Ocrevus, Hemlibra and Vabysmo all logging sales declines and coming in below the analysts’ expectations for the three-month stretch.
While the numbers may look disappointing, some blame lies at the feet of volatile exchange rates, Roche’s chief financial officer, Alan Hippe, said on a conference call, stressing that “the major driver here is the U.S. dollar.”
Despite the year starting off “quite well,” the U.S. dollar has subsequently weakened against the Swiss franc, Hippe explained. Those exchange rate woes have prompted Roche to forecast a -5% impact on sales and a -8% impact on core earnings per share for the year, the CFO said.
Since Roche generates approximately 48% of its sales in the U.S., the company is at a disadvantage when it converts American revenues into its reporting currency. The dollar has lost about 13% of its value versus the Swiss franc so far this year.
Roche's pharma sector
Breaking down the individual performance of Roche’s star drugs, breast cancer offering Phesgo has grown sales an impressive 54% year-over-year during the first 9 months of the year, generating 1.8 billion Swiss francs over the period.
Meanwhile, global conversion rates to the drug—referring to patients switching to Phesgo from its infused predecessor medicines Perjeta and Herceptin—climbed to 51% in Q3, Teresa Graham, Roche’s pharmaceuticals CEO, said on the call.
“As we have already achieved our goal of 50% conversion, we are now increasing our ambition to hit a global conversion rate of more than 60% before the advent of biosimilars,” she said.
The company’s hemophilia A injection Hemlibra has performed well on a year-to-date basis but saw third-quarter sales drop to 1.1 billion francs, down around 3% from the sum it generated for the period in 2024, according to ODDO BHF.
Despite the Q3 hiccup, Roche is now raising its 2025 sales growth expectations for Hemlibra to 10%, up from a previous mid-single-digit estimate, Graham said on the call.
On the neurology front, Roche’s multiple sclerosis workhorse Ocrevus suffered a roughly 1% sales decline for the quarter, clocking in revenues at 1.7 billion francs ($2.1 billion). As with Phesgo, Roche is currently aiming to convert U.S. patients on Ocrevus to a new subcutaneous formulation, dubbed Ocrevus Zunovo, which was approved last September.
Still, Roche seems to be having some trouble getting the subQ launch off the ground.
“It is important to remember that for many practices, switching to Zunovo is associated with logistical challenges,” Graham explained. “We are hoping to manage those, and we expect Zunovo uptake to accelerate further in coming quarters.” In the U.S., around 800 healthcare providers are now prescribing Ocrevus Zunovo, she added.
“The logistical challenges for Zunovo—they’re not that dissimilar than from what we saw with Phesgo when we were moving Phesgo into the oncology setting,” Graham elaborated later on during the call.
Elsewhere, Roche is downgrading its sales expectations for macular degeneration and macular edema drug Vabysmo for the year, lowering its forecast from roughly 20% growth to 15%, Graham noted. She attributed those reduced expectations to the “contraction” of the U.S. market for branded ophthalmology drugs.
At the same time, however, Vabysmo continues to gain ground in the market for anti-VEGF treatments, both in the U.S. and abroad, she said.
While performance in the quarter may have been shaky, Roche believes it’s well positioned in the back half of the decade.
“We do believe that we’re one of the companies which have less biosimilar erosion,” Roche CEO Thomas Schinecker said on the earnings call. “If you look at the next couple of years, we do believe we can compensate that with the medicines that we have in hand, and that we will continue to grow at least until ’28 and thereafter.”
“We believe we are set up for growth, and we also know that we’re not done with [business development],” he continued. “We can continue to invest in BD and bring in more opportunities that will continue to drive growth.”
U.S. policy considerations
As Roche reported on the performance of its leading drugs, many investors sitting in on the call pressed the company on potential drug pricing negotiations with the U.S. government, as well as the company’s standing in the U.S. as it pertains to pharmaceutical import tariffs.
On the tariff point, Roche boasts 13 manufacturing sites in the U.S. and has also been working to make its production operations more efficient in recent years, Schinecker said on the call, noting that “there is nothing for us at this stage where we would be concerned.”
Several investors pressed the chief executive on the status of presumed talks between Roche and the White House as well. In recent weeks, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Merck KGaA’s EMD Serono have each struck accords to lower certain drug prices in the U.S. in line with President Donald Trump’s “most favored nation” (MFN) cost reduction agenda.
In all three cases, the drugmakers who struck the deals have won temporary reprieve from Trump’s tariffs.
“I can say that we’ve been in discussions with the U.S. government for most part of this year,” Schinecker said on the topic of MFN talks. He noted that the company’s recently debuted direct-to-patient program for its influenza treatment Xofluza was one of the price reduction measures discussed with the government.
Trump’s MFN maneuvers broadly seek to align the cost of prescription drugs in the U.S. with the prices paid in comparable developed nations. While Schinecker did not go into detail about the fine details of Roche’s government negotiations, he did allude to broader conversations between governments around drug price equalization—as well as a reported probe that the U.S. means to launch into drug pricing practices abroad.
“This is a discussion that the U.S. government is having with us, but also with other governments around the world, to have a mechanism so that there is a different way and better sharing of cost for innovation, because this is what it is about in pharma,” Schinecker said on an earlier call with journalists.
“And it’s clear that countries with less money should pay less, but also countries which have more money should pay more,” he continued, noting that the U.S. has proposed a sliding pricing framework that would be based on countries’ GDPs.