AbbVie

Everyone is celebrating the Skyrizi and Rinvoq ramp but nobody wants to talk about the $60+ billion in long-term debt sitting on this balance sheet from the Allergan acquisition. Interest expenses alone are eating into free cash flow in a way that limits flexibility if anything goes wrong in the pipeline.

Skyrizi and Rinvoq are genuinely carrying this company right now — combined revenues hit over $4 billion in a single quarter and both drugs still have years of patent runway left. The Humira cliff was supposed to crater this stock but management executed the transition better than almost anyone expected. At this point the bear thesis is basically dead.

ABBV's dividend track record is underappreciated — they've been raising the dividend every year since spinning off from Abbott in 2013 and the yield is sitting around 3.5% even after the stock's run. For a pharma with this kind of free cash flow profile and two blockbusters still in growth phase, that income component makes the total return case pretty compelling.

Emraclidine for schizophrenia is priced into the bull thesis by a lot of investors but the Phase 2 data, while positive, was in a small trial and the competitive field already has Cobenfy from Bristol-Myers which just got approved and has first-mover advantage with the muscarinic mechanism story. AbbVie could be walking into a crowded indication with a drug that arrives late.

AbbVie received FDA approval for Epcoritamab in combination therapy for relapsed or refractory follicular lymphoma, expanding the bispecific antibody's label beyond diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. This was developed through the Genmab partnership and represents AbbVie's push to build out its oncology presence post-Humira. The hematology/oncology segment has been a stated priority for the company's next growth phase.

Does anyone have a good read on how Qulipta and Ubrelvy are actually performing against Pfizer's Nurtec in the migraine market? I see AbbVie calling out strong CGRP growth but the competitive dynamics there seem really tight and I can't tell if they're gaining or losing share.

AbbVie completed its acquisition of Cerevel Therapeutics for approximately $8.7 billion, adding emraclidine and tavapadon — a Parkinson's disease candidate — to its neuroscience pipeline. The deal was AbbVie's largest since Allergan and signals a deliberate strategic pivot toward CNS as a third major therapeutic pillar alongside immunology and oncology.

With biosimilar Humira now having been on the market for over a year and the erosion curve playing out, are people modeling a floor for Humira revenues or do we keep assuming continued decline indefinitely? Trying to figure out how much more drag is left.

Something I think is underappreciated about AbbVie's immunology positioning is that Skyrizi's IL-23 mechanism has a cleaner safety profile than the JAK inhibitor class that Rinvoq sits in, so they effectively have products for both the risk-tolerant prescriber and the more conservative one. That kind of portfolio coverage within a single therapeutic area is a real commercial advantage over competitors who only have one mechanism.

The Botox aesthetic business is more economically sensitive than people price in — when consumer spending softens, discretionary medical procedures get cut fast. We saw a noticeable slowdown in Botox Cosmetic volumes in the back half of last year that didn't get much attention because therapeutic Botox held up.