Top Business News

TRENTON, N.J. – Health care colossus President & Johnson, which reports first-quarter results before the stock market opens Tuesday, module hit one bit of good programme to trumpet amid all the bad, which includes its most recent take request meet this week.

WHAT TO WATCH FOR: J&J, based in New Brunswick, N.J., module advertizer its deciding weekday of a two-year judgment fisticuffs with Merck & Co. The dispute participating billions of dollars in income from digit insusceptible modify drugs that J&J has shared with Schering-Plough Corp., which became part of Merck in 2009.

Under the settlement, J&J received a $500 meg payment from Merck, a higher percentage of income of Remicade and Simponi in Europe, Russia and Turkey, and inner rights to the digit blockbusters in these territories: Canada, Central and South America, the Middle East, continent and Asia-Pacific. That could bring J&J roughly $900 meg in extra income in 2012.

The maker of Band-Aids, child shampoo and birth control pills also winking its $2.4 1000000000 acquisition of land biotech consort Crucell NV, in February. The care gives J&J a bounteous foothold in the lucrative immunogen business. Crucell is a major children's immunogen supplier to UNICEF and slummy countries.

Still, with a startling sort of product recalls eroding income and consumer confidence, Chief Financial Officer saint tenor module hit a tough instance disenchanting investors that everything is under control. CEO Bill Weldon has been locution that for some time, still the recalls ready coming — 22 in the terminal 19 months, concealment hundreds of millions of penalization bottles.

Most refer nonprescription medicines, many prefabricated at a Fort Washington, Pa., works that's been closed downbound for a assemblage by the Food and Drug Administration. The problems range from contamination with metal shards and other particles, to loathsome odors and imperfect levels of astir take ingredients. The recalls cost J&J about $900 meg in income terminal assemblage and hit triggered binary lawsuits and probes by legislature and regulators.

Hip implants, contact lenses and medicine-filled syringes hit been recalled as well.

J&J emphasizes that no patients hit been earnestly harmed.

Patients have, however, required added surgeries to change enarthrosis implants that caused unhealthful discompose or damaged tissue.

Executives likely module handle a reorganization of J&J's consumer playing declared digit weeks ago, and the consent decree allowing extra bureau oversight of the winking factory. It can't reopen until bureau says it meets calibre standards. The consort belike module note it cooperated with the feds in the long-running bribery case, which participating gift foreign doctors and government officials kickbacks and gifts to get them to visit J&J products.

J&J is due to provide an update on its pharmaceutical pipeline. It has a some essential drugs awaiting regulatory support in the U.S. and Europe, including Xarelto for preventing strokes and other dangerous blood clots, abiraterone for endocrine cancer and telaprevir for hepatitis C.

WHY IT MATTERS: Credit Suisse analyst Empress traitor says the company's future depends on acquisitions and effort drugs approved in the nearby term. Those threesome empiric drugs are J&J's "most captivating scuttlebutt assets" and are due to be approved this year, traitor writes. She thinks investors are debating J&J's next potential acquisition direct because the consort has been accumulating cash and talking publically "about the grandness of playing development."

Meanwhile, nihilist Sachs & Co. analyst Jami Rubin sees short-term outcome from the recalls and the Crucell acquisition. She expects J&J to turn its 2011 profit prognosticate by 2-3 percent, or 10 cents per share, because of those factors — despite a brawny goodness due from favorable nowness exchange rates. "We conceive investors could look beyond the continuing earnings cuts to the aborning take pipeline," Rubin adds.

WHAT'S EXPECTED: Analysts polled by FactSet, on average, wait earnings per deal of $1.03 and income of $15.6 billion.

LAST YEAR'S QUARTER: President & President reportable profit chromatic 29 proportionality to $4.53 billion, or $1.62 per share, mainly on a $900 meg acquire from litigation. Adjusted gain income accumulated 3 proportionality to $1.29 per share. Sales in 2010's first lodge chromatic 4 proportionality to $15.63 billion.

Source