AstraZeneca aims to nearly double revenues to $80bn by 2030

Britain’s biggest drugmaker, AstraZeneca, has set out a bold ambition to reach $80bn (£63bn) in revenues by 2030 from treatments for cancer, rare diseases and other conditions, by launching 20 major new medicines before the end of the decade.

As the company prepared to present its growth plans to shareholders at its labs and corporate headquarters in Cambridge, it said many of the 20 new drugs will have the potential to generate more than $5bn in annual revenues at their peak.

The Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical company made revenues of $45.8bn last year, achieving the goal it had set out as part of its defence against a £70bn hostile takeover approach from US rival Pfizer in 2014 one year early.

“Today AstraZeneca announces a new era of growth,” the chief executive, Pascal Soriot, said. “The breadth of our portfolio together with continued investment in innovation supports sustained growth well past the end of the decade.”

The company said it would continue to invest in “transformative new technologies and platforms that will shape the future of medicine”.

With Soriot at the helm, AstraZeneca has revamped its drugs pipeline and developed a portfolio of cancer, cardiovascular and rare disease medicines, including many blockbuster drugs with revenues of more than $1bn a year. However, its share price growth has been sluggish in the past year, slowing to 1.3%.

Earlier this month, the company said it had begun the worldwide withdrawal of its Covid-19 jab due to a “surplus of available updated vaccines”.

On Monday, the drugmaker announced plans to build a $1.5bn factory in Singapore to manufacture a promising new generation of cancer-killing drugs called antibody-drug conjugates. They are engineered antibodies that bind to tumour cells and release chemicals that kill those cells without damaging surrounding healthy tissue.

Russ Mould, the investment director at the stockbroker AJ Bell, said AstraZeneca was “reaching for the stars” with its new sales target, which sent its shares up by 0.7% to £121.88, making them the second-biggest riser on the FTSE 100 on Tuesday morning.

Mould added: “An easy way for AstraZeneca to achieve such a goal would be to go on a spending spree and buy up rival companies. However, AstraZeneca implies it will hit the goal through organic means which would be all the more impressive.

“Chief executive Pascal Soriot is no stranger to controversy over the scale of his pay packet so perhaps he is trying to justify the large renumeration with the new growth plan. Achieving the goal would imply significant value generation for shareholders and no doubt himself given that part of his bonus scheme will be based on company performance.”

Soriot is in line for a maximum pay package of £18.7m this year, which was described by the High Pay Centre thinktank as “excessive” and sparked a shareholder rebellion last month.

Mould warned that developing new medicines is not an easy task, as there is a high failure rate, and revenues of medicines are drastically reduced once patents expire, allowing generic drugmakers to produce cheaper versions.