A quick look at Pfizer’s Income and Tax over the last ten years

Pfizer’s latest quarterly results have been in the news lately, so I thought I would take a closer look at Pfizer’s recent track record.

Starting here:

Pfizer Inc. (PFE) income statement – Yahoo Finance

TTM = trailing twelve months. The impact of government contracts is clearly evident in 2021 and 2022. Revenue is still ahead of the pre-C19 number at 68.5 bn in the TTM v 51.75 for CY 2019. But this is entirely offset by cost of revenue of an increase from 10 to 27 billion.

There are a few adjustments to gross profit to get to income before tax, but check out the tax bill for each year.

The TTM will have a tax rebate of 90 million bucks! Last I heard, Corporate Tax was 21%. Same goes for the prior years.

Looking a little deeper, we can scratch this out for the last ten years from here:

Pfizer Income Statement 2009-2023 | PFE | MacroTrends

SG&A – Selling General and Administrative – represents the slush fund from which all those ads you see on and in the MSM come from.

It’s all arbitrary. The US Corporate tax rate was 35% until Trump took a sledgehammer to it. Corporates did not pay the 35% anyway – more like 10%. I wonder what the 9 billion tax rebate was for, in 2017?

I recall stories of companies like Pfizer using all sorts of devices to evade – woops – avoid tax including offshore tax havens and scruffy one room offices in the back streets of Amsterdam which – apparently – have tax exemption. The use of transfer pricing (charging high tax subsidiaries in foreign countries high prices and “selling the goods” for huge profits to subsidiaries in low tax countries) is rife in all multinationals.

Anyone every see a global income statement with the sign off of every countries tax authority for taxes paid in their country, summed to a global level?

Bottom line: In the last ten years Pfizer has generated 560 billion in revenue and paid 8 billion in taxes instead of the 71 billion in taxes that 21% of its net income would imply.

Not a good corporate citizen. The 85 billion in R&D spent over the last ten years has not resulted in safe and effective injections or pills!

Out of interest, here’s how Pfizer described its revenue generators in 2022 from here:

“Take a look at our breakdown of the top medicines and vaccines by revenue from 2022.

Those “blockbusters” sum to 70 odd billion, which compared to the 100 billion i revenue means that other “stuff”, generated 30 billion bucks.

If you want a bit more grist to add to the mill, here’s a face you will know:

Proxy Statement 2023 (q4cdn.com)

Onwards!

Please subscribe or donate via Ko-fi – any amount from 3 bucks upwards. Don’t worry and God Bless, if you can’t or don’t want to. Ko-fi donations here: https://ko-fi.com/peterhalligan - an annual subscription of 100 bucks is one third less than a $3 Ko-fi donation a week!