Shionogi's 2005 sales 196.4B yen, down 1.5%

Japan's Shionogi says that, for the year ended March 2006, its sales were down 1.5% to 196.4 billion yen ($1.74 billion), due in part to the transfer in October 2005 of its capsule business to the USA's Carlyle group, which the firm believes cost it 5.7 billion yen in turnover.

Despite the drop in sales, the firm's net income grew 20% to 22.7 billion yen, helped by 9.5 billion yen of extraordinary income from the sale of its capsule business. In addition, the company said that the year has seen continued revenue growth from Finibax (doripenem), which posted 800.0 million yen after its September 2005 launch and the antibacterial agent Avelox (moxifloxacin HCl) that it licenses from Germany's Bayer, which produced 1.8 billion yen in sales. Revenue from the firm's oral morphine analgesic MS Contin (morphine sulfate) dropped 37.5% to 3.5 billion yen, which the firm attributes to the switch to newer morphine products, including Oxycontin (oxycodone).

Shionogi added that the royalty income, derived from its licensing of Crestor (rosuvastatin) to Anglo-Swedish firm AstraZeneca, soared 68.8% to 8.1 billion yen as a result of the growth of overseas sales. In Japan, turnover from Crestor was a more modest 100.0 million yen due to the firm's ongoing market surveillance, undertaken to establish the products safety in Japanese patients.