What Is The Best Case For Pfizer Stock?
Pfizer’s COVID products keep shrinking. The company’s total revenue has been flat for a year. That makes the best case for this stock easy to miss. It does not rest on the medicines you already know Pfizer (PFE) for. It is not another round of cost cuts either. It rests on a smaller and faster part of the company. So where is that growth coming from?
Which Part Of Pfizer Is Actually Growing?
Pfizer groups its newest and recently acquired medicines together. It reports them as one number. That group brought in $3.2 billion of revenue in the fiscal second quarter of 2026. It grew 18% from a year earlier, before currency effects. Total revenue rose 1% over the same period, also before currency effects. Excluding COVID products, it rose 5%. So this group is growing far faster than the company around it.
Two details fill in that picture. The medicines from the Seagen deal grew 21% in the United States against the same quarter a year earlier. That figure excludes a one-time stocking benefit in the earlier quarter. Padcev, acquired through the Seagen deal, is one of the standout drivers Pfizer highlighted. Among new patients with advanced urothelial cancer, more than 60% now get Padcev. The next question is whether that growth is large enough to matter.
Can That Group Get Big Enough To Move Pfizer?
Start with the size. Pfizer’s revenue in that quarter was $15 billion. So the newer medicines are roughly a fifth of the total. The rest of Pfizer is much bigger. Over the last twelve months the whole company took in $63.7 billion. That is flat against the year before. At Pfizer’s size, one fast-growing group lifts the total slowly.
The group also has to outrun a business that is falling. Management now expects about $4 billion of COVID revenue in 2026. That is down from the $5 billion it expected earlier. Pfizer still raised its full-year 2026 revenue guidance by $500 million at the midpoint, on strong non-COVID sales. Management also aims for risk-adjusted high single-digit revenue growth from the end of 2028 through the end of 2033. That is a target, not a result.
Meanwhile the price has already moved. The stock returned 24% over the past year. The S&P 500 returned 17.9% over the same period. The stock also trades 3.8% below its highest price of the past year. Pfizer trades at 38.2 times its trailing twelve months GAAP earnings but that figure is distorted by $4.3 billion in non-cash impairment charges booked in the second quarter.
On an adjusted basis, the stock trades at under 10 times forward earnings—well below the S&P 500’s 22.6 multiple. So while the headline multiple makes the stock look expensive, you are actually paying far less per dollar of core operating profit than the broader market commands. At that level the price appears to assume these newer medicines keep growing. What has to go right for that?
What Do You Need To See Next?
The newer group needs a steady supply of new drugs behind it. Whether that supply is there is the open question. The nearest test is a study of mevrometostat. That is an experimental prostate cancer treatment. Its first results are expected in the fourth quarter of 2026. An analyst on the fiscal second quarter 2026 call asked management how to judge success. Management said the study’s statistical analysis plan is based on a clinically meaningful benefit of about 30%. The comparison is with the current standard of care. That 30% is the number to watch. If the result clears that bar, the case that Pfizer can replace what it is losing gets stronger. If it misses, you are paying an elevated multiple for a business that has yet to show meaningful top-line growth.
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