AstraZeneca completes sale of commercial rights to Atacand for £294 million

AstraZeneca plc (LON: AZN) confirmed on Tuesday that it had sold commercial rights to its drug for hypertension management for £294.44 million to Cheplapharm Arzneimittel GmbH.

AstraZeneca is almost flat on average on the intraday chart. At £74 per share, the stock has recovered significantly compared to the low of £62.21 per share in March when the COVID-19 crisis wreaked havoc on the global financial markets. The pharmaceutical company had touched a high of £93.20 per share in late July. Learn more about the stock market volatility.

Atacand and Atacand Plus reported £65.51 million of pre-tax profit in 2019

According to the British-Swedish multinational, the German pharmaceutical company had already paid £184.02 million to bring Atacand drug on its portfolio. The remaining £110.41 million, AstraZeneca said, will be paid in the first half of 2021.

In 2019, the pharmaceutical giant reported £65.51 million of pre-tax profit attributed to Atacand and Atacand Plus. The drug for hypertension management is available in seventy countries.

AstraZeneca had developed Atacand in collaboration with the Japanese multinational biopharmaceutical company, Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Each of the two companies had exclusive rights to the hypertension management drug in certain countries.

The Cambridge-based company has been in headlines in recent weeks as Britain became the first country to approve its COVID-19 vaccine for use on 30^th December. Several other countries, including India and Mexico, followed the United Kingdom in its footsteps and approved AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine that it developed in collaboration with the Oxford University.

Thailand orders another 35 million doses of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine

Thailand’s prime minister Prayut Chan-o-cha also revealed in a statement on Tuesday that the Southeast Asian country had ordered another 35 million doses of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine. Thailand has now ordered 63 million doses of the vaccine in total.

Publishing the preliminary results of its late-stage trial, AstraZeneca had said in November that its vaccine was 70% effective on average for the COVID-19 patients. When given as two full doses at least a month apart, the efficacy of its COVID-19 vaccine was 62%. But patients who receive half a dose followed by a full dose after a month showed efficacy of a much broader 90%.

AstraZeneca performed slightly downbeat in the stock market last year with an annual decline of more than 5%. At the time of writing, it is valued at £97.82 billion and has a price to earnings ratio of 53.17.