Telehealth company Hims & Hers reported first-quarter results late Monday that beat Wall Street estimates. But parts of the company's forecast came in below estimates, and looming worries about the company's growth as the era of cheap, legal knockoff weight loss drugs comes to an end had the stock bouncing around on Tuesday.
The stock was down as much as 7.5% in premarket trading, but rebounded as the market opened. Shares are up 7.8% to $45.14 in Tuesday morning trading.
Hims reported first-quarter revenue of $586 million, beating the FactSet consensus estimate of $539 million. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization were $91.1 million, better than the $61 million consensus estimate.
The company's guidance for the second quarter, however, fell a bit short of estimates. Hims said it expects second-quarter revenue of $530 million to $550 million, below the FactSet consensus estimate of $553 million. It expects adjusted Ebitda of $65 million to $75 million in the second quarter, in line with the $72 million target.
The company maintained its 2025 revenue guidance and slightly raised its full-year earnings guidance. But it rolled out a revenue target for 2030 of "at least $6.5 billion," below the $7.8 billion consensus estimate. Its new adjusted Ebitda target for 2030 is $1.3 billion, just ahead of the $1.2 billion estimate.
Hims shares are up more than 260% over the past 12 months. The company sells mostly generic and compounded medicines online, pairing cheap, older drugs for cash payers with intensive marketing campaigns.
Its business has been transformed over the past year by its entry into the weight loss market. Early in 2024, it started offering a legal knockoff version of Novo Nordisk's Wegovy manufactured by a compounding pharmacy. Hims sold the medicine, called compounded semaglutide, for a fraction of the list price of Novo's version, and it invested heavily in a marketing campaign that culminated with a controversial Super Bowl ad.
Shares hit an intraday peak of $72.98 in late February, just before the Food and Drug Administration announced the end of the ongoing Wegovy shortage, meaning that all compounders need to stop making compounded semaglutide by May 22.
Hims' first-quarter performance is likely something of an afterthought for investors, as it covers a period before the Wegovy shortage ended. More relevant is the company's ability to keep growing even with a reduced ability to sell compounded semaglutide.
In a note late Monday, Citi Research analyst Daniel Grosslight called the results "a bit of a Rorschach test." Optimists will point to good performance in the first quarter, he said, while pessimists will say that the "lackluster" guidance for the second quarter will mean the company needs to perform very well in the second half of the year to meet its full-year guidance. "We are somewhere in the middle," Grosslight wrote. He has a Sell rating on the stock, but raised his target price to $30 from $25.
The end of the compounded semaglutide industry hasn't dimmed Hims' own view about its future. The company said in February it still expects weight-loss sales of "at least $725 million" in 2025, or 30% of its overall projected revenue, even without compounded semaglutide. It hasn't said what its weight loss sales were in 2024, but it did say its GLP-1 sales were $225 million that year.
The stock is down just over 35% since the FDA declared the Wegovy shortage over, but it's still up more than 70% this year.
Shares jumped 23% on April 29 when Novo said that it would allow Hims and a handful of other telehealth companies to sell branded Wegovy directly to cash-paying patients through their websites. Novo already sells Wegovy through its own online pharmacy for $499 per month to uninsured patients, or patients whose insurance won't cover the drug. Hims said it would charge $599 per month for branded Wegovy.
The deal raised new questions about the company's plans to continue to sell personalized doses of compounded semaglutide even after the compounders can no longer make it in bulk. Though the company had previously suggested that it planned to sell personalized doses of GLP-1 drugs to large numbers of patients after the shortages ended, it has pulled back on that rhetoric. On an investor call Monday, Hims CEO Andrew Dudum called personalized GLP-1 drugs "relatively additive."
On the call, analysts asked whether Novo had raised concerns about Hims continuing to sell personalized doses of compounded semaglutide, and if there was a risk that Novo could stop letting Hims sell branded Wegovy over concern about ongoing compounded semaglutide sales.
"We made this very clear, we believe that personalized semaglutide is both clinically necessary for some patients because of the side effects that are very widespread and well-known, and that the regulation" allows for some compounding, Dudum said. "We're not talking about bulk manufacturing during a shortage, we're talking about personalization."
Dudum suggested that, in the end, Novo knew it had to work with Hims based on its numbers. "[W]e have millions of patients on Hims & Hers platform," he said. "We have 10,000 to 15,000 patients we're treating every single day. And they are looking for options."
Early Monday, Hims announced the hiring of a former Amazon.com executive, Nader Kabbani, as chief operations officer. At Amazon, Kabbani led the launch of Amazon Pharmacy, the company's mail-order pharmacy service. The stock climbed 2.8% during Monday trading.
Write to Josh Nathan-Kazis at josh.nathan-kazis@barrons.com
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