By Josh Nathan-Kazis

The vaccine maker Moderna had no Valentine's Day chocolates for investors when its fourth-quarter financial results came out on Friday morning.

The company had prereported its annual results and previewed its 2025 guidance in mid-January, so there were few surprises left. There wasn't much to leaven an increasingly troubled outlook.

Moderna reported fourth-quarter revenue of $1 billion, compared with the consensus estimate of $943 million among analysts tracked by FactSet. The company lost $2.91 per share in the quarter, while the consensus call was for a loss of $2.68 a share.

Full-year revenue was $3.2 billion in 2024, and full-year product sales were $3.1 billion, in line with what the company had said in January. Moderna said it continues to expect 2025 revenue of between $1.5 billion and $2.5 billion.

When Moderna first rolled out these numbers, investors panicked. The stock fell 17% in a single day as investors worried that Moderna may run out of money before new products can pick up the slack.

In an email to investors at the time, Mizuho healthcare equity strategist Jared Holz wrote that Moderna "could theoretically go out of business."

Moderna CFO Jamey Mock told Barron's in mid-January that the company thinks it can still break even in 2028 and won't need to raise new capital to get there.

"We will adjust our spending in line with what will happen with the revenue line," he said. "In 2024, we took down our costs by over 25%. In 2025, we have plans to take it down by another billion. And then we are planning to take it down by another half a billion in 2026."

Shortly after the mid-January preannouncement, Moderna received a parting gift from the Biden administration in the form of a $590 million contract to push its messenger RNA-based pandemic flu vaccine toward approval. It was part of an eleventh-hour rush by Biden officials to ramp up preparations for a potential H5N1 pandemic.

The award was a major one for the Department of Health and Human Services division known as BARDA, which had contributed $176 million to the same Moderna program last year. Moderna shares climbed nearly 25% in the following three days.

But that wasn't enough to reverse the broader narrative on the stock, which is down 65% over the past 12 months, and 23% so far this year.

Moderna said Friday that sales of its Covid-19 vaccine Spikevax were $923 million in the fourth quarter, roughly in line with the $909 million consensus estimate. Sales of its new respiratory syncytial virus vaccine mRESVIA were $15 million in the quarter, in line with the $13 million FactSet consensus estimate.

Sales of the RSV vaccine have been a particular disappointment. While the RSV market boomed in 2023, the year Pfizer and GSK launched their shots, it was far smaller in 2024, when the Moderna shot arrived.

Moderna had $9.5 billion in cash as of the end of 2024. It anticipates having $6 billion in cash at the end of this year.

For 2025, Moderna maintained its January guidance that it anticipates revenue of between $1.5 billion and $2.5 billion, well below the $2.9 billion that had been the FactSet consensus estimate in mid January. Just a year earlier, analysts had been looking toward 2025 sales of $5 billion.

The company says it is making progress on the 10 product approvals it hopes to have by the end of 2027, and is cutting costs. The question is whether it can cut enough costs, and launch enough products, to survive until it breaks even.

Write to Josh Nathan-Kazis at josh.nathan-kazis@barrons.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

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February 14, 2025 06:30 ET (11:30 GMT)

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