Stock Watch: Is Johnson & Johnson Edging Away From Pharma?

As usual, Johnson & Johnson opened first-quarter 2024 earnings season for life sciences companies, reporting sales that grew by just over 2% on the same quarter of 2023 and were just below those of the fourth quarter of 2023. While the absence of sequential quarterly revenue growth – which is usually generated in the first quarter by early January pharmaceutical list price increases – was a minor theme of J&J’s results, it was not enough to explain investors’ reaction to the announcement. In the premarket, J&J’s stock price opened modestly down but this accelerated in normal trading to reach a 52-week low. J&J’s stock price closed the day of its announcement down by over 2% compared to the NYSE Arca Pharmaceutical Index’s decline of less than 1%. Investors seemed partially aligned with analysts whose consensus estimates of J&J’s total first-quarter sales were missed slightly.

The lack of sequential growth was not the only recurring theme in J&J’s first-quarter results. There is another theme that...