We recently compiled a list of the 10 Firms Fall Amid Disappointing Earnings Performance. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Merck & Co. Inc. (NYSE:MRK) stands against the other stocks.

Wall Street’s main indices all finished in the green territory on Tuesday, buoyed by news that the US is set to temporarily delay taxes levied on select goods from Canada and Mexico to make way for a potential negotiation.

The Dow Jones inched up by 0.30 percent, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq both jumped 0.72 percent and 1.35 percent, respectively.

Meanwhile, 10 companies bucked an overall positive market sentiment, leading declines mostly due to disappointing earnings performance in the past quarter. This article details the reasons behind their poor performance.

To come up with Tuesday’s biggest losers, we only considered the companies with $2 billion in market capitalization and $5 million in daily trading volume.

A close-up of a person's hand holding a bottle of pharmaceuticals.

Merck & Co. Inc. (NYSE:MRK)

Pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. Inc. (NYSE:MRK) saw its share prices decrease by 9.07 percent on Tuesday to end at $90.74 apiece after providing a lower 2025 outlook guidance.

The company set a sales guidance between $64.1 billion and $65.6 billion in full-year 2025, or lower than the Wall Street consensus of $67.4 billion.

Likewise, its targeted earnings per share were lower at $8.88 to $9.03, as compared with analysts' expectations of $9.21.

In the fourth quarter of 2024, Merck delivered a net income of $3.74 billion, which, albeit marking a swing from a net loss of $1.2 billion in the same quarter in 2023, was noticeably lower than Wall Street’s estimate of $3.92 billion.

For the full year, Merck reported $64.2 billion in revenues, representing a 7 percent increase from 2023.

Overall MRK ranks 3rd on our list of Tuesday's biggest losers. While we acknowledge the potential of MRK as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than MRK but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.

 

READ NEXT: 20 Best AI Stocks To Buy Now and Complete List of 59 AI Companies Under $2 Billion in Market Cap.

 

Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.