Even as trial setbacks and pipeline adjustment rear their heads, AstraZeneca feels confident that its core business is on track to support the $80 billion revenue goal it’s set for 2030. And on the more existential topics of China competition, U.S. drug pricing reform and the potential need for an external pipeline refresh, AZ’s top brass is keeping its cool.
In 2026’s second quarter, the British Big Pharma generated revenue of nearly $15.4 million, growing 5% over the same period in 2025 at constant exchange rates.
With the first act of 2026 now in the books, AZ is reporting total revenue of $30.7 billion, up some 6%, driven primarily by sales in oncology, rare disease and respiratory and immunology, which each grew over the first half of the year, even as total biopharma earnings dropped for the six-month period thanks to a hit in infectious disease.
Among the high-grossing cancer unit, TKI lung cancer med Tagrisso remained AZ’s top earner with Q2 sales of $1.94 billion and a first-half-of-2026 haul amounting to nearly $3.8 billion, following closely by PD-L1 blockbuster Imfinzi, which brought home $1.85 billion and $3.55 billion for Q2 and the first six months of 2026, respectively.
Major multi-billion-dollar sales hauls for the second quarter and first half of the year were also posted by Farxiga in AZ’s cardiovascular category, plus Symbicort and Fasenra in the respiratory and immunology segment and Ultomiris from the rare disease portfolio, with the latter drug growing 12% to $1.31 billion for the quarter. While an improvement year-over-year, that performance fell short of analyst’s expectations by around $24 million, according to a note from Jefferies Monday.
Adding to that dent in Ultomiris’ quarterly report card, AZ revealed early Monday that a phase 3 trial pitting the drug against placebo in teens and adults with thrombotic microangiopathy after hematopoietic stem cell transplant had failed to hit statistical significance on the primary endpoint of event-free survival through 26 weeks.
Thrombotic microangiopathies (TMAs) are rare and potentially lethal disorders that cause blood clots and damage to the walls of the smallest blood vessels in the circulatory system, and AZ had been testing Ultomiris in a type of the condition that occurs after hematopoietic stem cell transplant to treat cancer and other diseases.
Still, AZ noted that its Alexion rare disease unit has nevertheless seen clinically meaningful trends around overall survival and continues to advance studies on Ultomiris in the indication.
The Ultomiris slip follows other phase 3 misses from AZ drugs in the period, including for Imfinzi in adjuvant hepatocellular carcinoma and Wainua in ATTR-CM.
Separately, AZ revealed in its earnings report that it has scrapped two in-house antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) candidates that underperformed in the clinic. Nevertheless, executives told Fierce on a media call earlier Monday that they remain “very confident” in the company’s roster of investigational ADCs overall.
When pressed on an analyst call whether AZ needs to lean on M&A activity to bolster its late-stage pipeline—especially as the company heads for a significant patent expiration period early in the next decade—CEO Pascal Soriot said in no uncertain terms that “the answer is no: We don’t need more BD to deliver.”
Soriot emphasized that his confidence doesn’t come from any one single asset but the company’s phase 3 pipeline in aggregate, noting that AZ tracks its overall chance of phase 3 success at “around 60%,” which he noted was a bit lower than the industry average and below AZ’s historic track record of “75%-plus.”
“The reason we don’t need more BD is really to continue planning long-term and continuously strengthen our franchises,” the CEO explained, pointing to Tagrisso as one example of a product worth investing in internally rather than rushing out to acquire a new asset.
AstraZeneca’s overall second quarter earnings were in line with expectations, the Jefferies analysts pointed out Monday, noting that outsized Q2 performances from hypophosphatasia drug Strensiq (up 36% at $536 million) lymphoma and leukemia med Calquence (up 16% $1.02 billion) and asthma treatment Tezspire (up 45% $390 million) helping counter misses from Tagrisso and Lynparza, as well as AZ’s asthma rescue inhaler Airsupra ($50 million Q2), which “continues to lag,” in the Jefferies team’s estimation.
With less than six months to go before the year is out, AZ is sticking to the previous guidance range, which anticipates a mid-to-high single digit percentage revenue increase over 2025 at constant currencies. Moreover, the company reiterated that it’s confident in the $80 billion revenue target it has pledged to deliver in 2030.
In reflecting on Tagrisso, Soriot also touched on the matter of China, where AZ has continued to commit resources heavily even as hawkishness around competition with the country mounts in places like the U.S.
But in the CEO’s estimation, this deep relationship is exactly what positions AstraZeneca well to compete as the international biopharma landscape continues to evolve.
“If you don’t have a very strong domestic business from a profit viewpoint, it’s not that simple to globalize,” Soriot said of the current China biotech dynamic. “But you have to assume they will at some point.”
“What we’re doing,” he continued, “is collaborating, but we’re also competing. You saw the competition in the Tragrisso market is very, very intense, and in the ADC market very intense too. So, we learn to compete with them, and certainly we’ll take those learnings globally when they become global companies, if they do.”
Soriot added that “We’re also learning from [China biotechs] in terms of how they develop products and how fast they operate. And we’ve made some changes in the way we operate.”