Pfizer: when a boom ends
How a COVID vaccine and treatment more than doubled Pfizer's revenue, and what happened when demand faded.
Last updated: October 2026
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The situation
Pfizer is one of the world's largest drug companies. Before the pandemic, its revenue was large but growing slowly. In 2020, it also separated its business of older medicines whose patents had expired, which merged with Mylan to form a new company, Viatris.
In December 2020, the COVID-19 vaccine Pfizer developed with the German company BioNTech became the first to be authorized in the United States. Governments around the world ordered billions of doses, and at the end of 2021 Pfizer's pill to treat COVID, Paxlovid, was authorized too.
Revenue more than doubled within two years and reached a record in 2022. It was clear to everyone, Pfizer included, that much of it came from a single, unusual event.
The numbers
Pfizer (PFE), fiscal years 2019 to 2024
| Metric | FY2019 | FY2020 | FY2021 | FY2022 | FY2023 | FY2024 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $40.9B | $41.7B | $81.3B | $101.2B | $59.6B | $63.6B |
| Revenue Growth | +0.2% | +1.8% | +95.2% | +24.5% | −41.1% | +6.8% |
| Net Income | $16.0B | $9.16B | $22.0B | $31.4B | $2.12B | $8.03B |
| Net Profit Margin | 39.2% | 22.0% | 27.0% | 31.0% | 3.6% | 12.6% |
| Free Cash Flow | $10.5B | $12.2B | $29.9B | $26.0B | $4.79B | $9.84B |
What the numbers showed
The table shows both the size of the boom and how fast it faded. In 2023, as the pandemic ended and governments needed far fewer doses, revenue fell by about 40%, and Pfizer also reversed billions of dollars of Paxlovid sales for treatments that were returned unused. fell much more than revenue, because many of the company's costs didn't shrink as fast as its sales.
What happened next
Pfizer used part of its pandemic cash, and a lot of borrowed money, to buy other companies, most notably the cancer-drug maker Seagen for about $43 billion in 2023. It also announced large cost cuts. Its share price, which had risen during the boom, fell to less than half of its late-2021 peak.
What was uncertain at the time
- How long people would keep getting COVID vaccines and treatments, and how much governments would keep paying for them.
- Whether the companies and new medicines bought with the pandemic cash would replace the lost sales.
- How several older best-selling drugs would do as their patents expired later in the decade.
What this case shows
A sudden jump in revenue says little about the future until you know where it comes from. When growth depends on a one-time event, a more useful question is what the business looks like without it. The case also shows how profit can fall faster than revenue when sales drop.