NEW YORK – Quidel on Thursday after the close of the market reported a 21 percent year-over-year decrease in preliminary fourth quarter revenues, beating Wall Street estimates.
For the quarter ended Dec. 31, the San Diego-based diagnostics manufacturer expects total revenues in the range of $633 million to $637 million, including COVID-19 revenues of approximately $510 million. For the same quarter last year, the firm reported $809.2 million in revenues. Analysts had estimated fourth quarter 2021 revenues of $465.7 million.
"From the opening of our largest American immunoassay manufacturing facility to date in just nine months, to shipping nearly 77 million total rapid immunoassay tests in the quarter, to announcing our definitive agreement to acquire Ortho Clinical Diagnostics Holdings, Quidel emerged from a challenging year with the strongest portfolio of physical, financial, and intellectual assets in our history," Douglas Bryant, Quidel's president and CEO, said in a statement.
In the quarter, Quidel sold approximately 65 million QuickVue COVID-19 antigen tests and more than 4 million Sofia SARS antigen tests, a new record for quarterly test sales volumes, according to Bryant. The firm also expanded its installed base of Sofia analyzers to over 76,000 instruments.
"We continue to work diligently to meet demand from government, retail, employers, and distributors for our QuickVue At-Home OTC COVID-19 test," Bryant said.
The firm expects full-year revenues of approximately $1.70 billion, above the average analyst estimate of $1.53 billion but well below revenue guidance of $2.5 billion it issued in March of 2021.
Bryant also noted that Quidel expects to add "two new transformative drivers" in the first quarter of 2022 with the introduction of its Savanna multiplex molecular analyzer platform and the opportunity to extend its point-of-care testing to include clinical laboratories and transfusion medicine once the Ortho Clinical Diagnostics acquisition has closed.
In Friday morning trading on the Nasdaq, shares of Quidel were down approximately 3 precent to $122.84.