Beleaguered Teva Reports Slight Upturn

Teva Pharmaceuticals struggled to pull out of the lowest share price in a year on Wednesday, reporting a slight upturn.

Shares stood at $6.90 after bottoming at $6.34 earlier in the day. The drugmaker recorded better than expected non-GAAP earnings of $0.60.

At the same time, Teva CFO Michael McClellan said on Wednesday that he was stepping down for personal reasons, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Teva president and CEO Kåre Schultz stressed the positive in a statement: “During the second quarter, portfolio optimization and new launches stabilized our North American generics business, Copaxone performed above expectations and Austedo achieved a very strong growth rate. We continue to focus our efforts on growth for Ajovy in the U.S. and are excited by the early momentum of the product’s recent launches in the EU.

“We are on track to achieve the targets of our two year restructuring plan, and based on our good results for the first half of the year we are reaffirming our full year guidance,” Schultz added.

The catalog of Teva woes include debt, litigation in the U.S. on price fixing and the opioid epidemic, falling Copaxone sales and U.S. generic prices. Recently, it was replaced by Check Point technology as Israel’s biggest company.