Citi Maintains a Hold Rating on Pfizer (PFE) Amidst Pricing Policy Headwinds
A medical technician wearing protective gloves and a mask mixing a biopharmaceutical solution.
The Most Favored Nation (MFN) pricing policy is a government initiative in the United States to lower prescription drug prices to ensure that the prices paid by US government programs do not exceed the lowest prices paid by comparable developed countries. This policy has resurfaced under the Trump administration in 2025. The Trump administration argues that this policy will result in US drug prices dropping by 30% to 80%.
During the first quarter 2025 earnings call, Dave Denton, CFO of Pfizer Inc. (NYSE:PFE), noted the changes in the IRA Medicare Part D redesign, tempered US revenue. The IRA Medicare Part D is another government initiative aimed at cutting drug prices. Analyst Meacham noted that although the company is actively pursuing opportunities in oncology and cardio-metabolic assets, the market remains overvalued. Thereby requiring a disciplined approach to business development. Moreover, the pricing policy headwinds present challenges that Pfizer Inc. (NYSE:PFE) has to navigate carefully, thereby justifying the Hold rating.
While we acknowledge the potential of PFE as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and have limited downside risk. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than PFE and that has 100x upside potential, check out our report about the .
READ NEXT: and .
Disclosure: None
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
5 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Nvidia is the most underowned megacap stock, Morgan Stanley says
Nvidia (NVDA) may be the market's biggest AI stock, but institutional investors are still shying away. "NVDA is now the most under-owned large-cap tech stock," Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring wrote in a note. Though the chipmaker has grown into the world's most valuable company, investors don't hold it in line with its S&P 500 (^GSPC) weight. According to Woodring, Nvidia's market value accounts for 7.37% of the index, but its share in the average active institutional portfolio is 4.2%, an adjusted underweight of 2.41 percentage points. The gap is the largest of any of the 15 major tech companies Morgan Stanley's team tracks. The disconnect highlights Nvidia's unique position. Its stock has been one of the best-performing names — up nearly 1,300% in the past five years — thanks to the AI boom. But its rapid rise and ongoing risks tied to geopolitics and supply chains have made some investors hesitant to load up. History shows that underowned stocks often get pulled higher over time as investors gradually increase their holdings to match the stock's weight in the index. "There is a statistically significant relationship between low active ownership ... and future stock performance," Morgan Stanley wrote. By comparison, Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL), and Amazon (AMZN) are also underowned, but not to Nvidia's extent. Microsoft was underweight by 2.39%, Apple by 1.66%, and Amazon by 1.40%. In contrast, the most overowned tech stocks include Intuit (INTU) at +0.83%, Oracle (ORCL) at +0.32%, and Dell (DELL) at +0.25%. Despite the underweighting, Nvidia's fundamentals remain solid. "Leading indicators of compute demand remain exceptionally strong with no signs of slowing," the firm's analysts wrote. "As supply chain constraints around rack-scale solutions ease and the U.S. government advances export license approvals for China, we continue to view Nvidia as a premier asset in the current era of AI dominance." Nvidia's stock has been up 33% in 2025, outperforming the S&P 500's 10% advance. Much of the optimism stems from demand for its graphics processing units (GPUs), used for AI and cloud-based enterprise applications. Still, not everyone is on board with the bullish sentiment surrounding megacap stocks. Torsten Sløk, Apollo Management's chief economist, previously told Yahoo Finance's Opening Bid that the current valuations in megacap tech stocks, and the index as a whole, may not be sustainable. (Disclosure: Yahoo Finance is owned by Apollo Global Management.) At the time, he pointed to internal data showing that the price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios of the 10 largest S&P 500 companies, including AI stocks like Meta (META) and Nvidia, had surpassed levels seen during the dot-com bubble in 1999. Francisco Velasquez is a Reporter at Yahoo Finance. He can be reached on LinkedIn and X, or via email at Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Gizmodo
6 minutes ago
- Gizmodo
The Moment the AI Hype Cycle Really Kicked In
Does it feel like news about artificial intelligence is inescapable? You're not just imagining it. Zach Perkel, the Principal and Director of Applied AI at enterprise AI firm Fractal, tracked the number of AI-related posts that managed to crack the top 10 stories on Y Combinator's Hacker News, and found that we are experiencing peak AI (so far). Perkel analyzed 24,910 articles and posts that managed to crack the Hacker News top 10 from January 1st, 2019, to August 15th, 2025, to determine just how much momentum the hype train has gained. He found that interest in AI has seemingly 10x-ed from the first quarter of 2019, when just 39 AI-related posts managed to crack the list. By contrast, the third quarter of 2025, which is just barely halfway through its calendar period, has already seen 337 bits of AI content at the top of Hacker News. It's no surprise that we're talking about AI significantly more now than we were in a pre-ChatGPT, pre-AI everywhere world. But what is a bit shocking is just how much the conversation has accelerated recently. Per Perkel's data, a huge spike in AI interest happened between the fourth quarter of 2022—which encompasses the public release of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022—and the first quarter of 2023, when conversation about the implications of the tool really started to heat up. That period saw a leap from 89 AI-related stories in the top 10 for Q4 2022 to 174 stories in Q1 2023. But that leap—the one that captures the moment we went from the public-facing chatbot not existing to being the dominant way in which people interact with AI—is the only one that is larger than the leap experienced between Q2 2025 and Q3 2025. Given that we're not even through this quarter, it's safe to assume that this will become the biggest spike in interest in AI yet. That's interesting, because Hacker News is not exactly for the uninitiated. It's not like that audience is just waking up to the accessibility or ramifications of widespread AI tools. It also makes Perkel's sentiment analysis of the posts a noteworthy indicator. He found that in the A.C. (After ChatGPT) era, no period has seen a larger percentage of negative posts about AI than the current quarter, which has seen 42% of posts critical of the topic. It also happens to be a new peak of a short-term trend, which has seen the sentiment on AI shift. In the first quarter of 2025, just 27% of top Hacker News posts on AI were negative. That jumped to 36% in the second quarter, which marked the highest percentage at the time since ChatGPT's introduction in late 2022—only to get topped again by the Q3 figures. There is almost certainly an AI bubble, though it's unclear if it's about to burst (OpenAI is on the verge of a $500 billion valuation). But there definitely appears to be an AI vibe shift.
Fast Company
6 minutes ago
- Fast Company
Black beauty businesses are stuggling under Trump's tariffs
Earlier this summer, Dajiah Blackshear-Calloway, 34, started to notice that her regular clients weren't visiting her hair salon as often as they used to. The salon, in Smyrna, Georgia, houses two stylists and offers dozens of services that range from $50 natural hairstyles to $745 tape-in weave extensions. Her most popular services are $254 sew-ins, where human hair extensions are woven into braids, and $125 quick weaves, where human or synthetic hair is styled and then glued to a stocking cap. But the prices of hair extensions and hair glues used to create wigs and weaves have gone up exponentially after U.S. President Donald Trump imposed a series of different tariffs on China and Vietnam, where the majority of Black beauty products are made. The price of a package of hair imported from Vietnam has gone up to $290 from $190 since May. A bottle of hair glue, imported from China, has gone up from $8 a bottle to $14.99 at her local beauty supply store. 'We're being impacted at every level,' Blackshear-Calloway said. 'I'm either having to eat that cost or pass that expense along to my clients, which affects their budgets and their pockets as well.' To avoid passing on rising costs, Blackshear-Calloway is asking her clients to bring their own hair to their appointments. Now her salon is offering a quick weave service without hair for $140, but with hair the price is $400, according to her booking website. She's also struggling to get products since her wholesaler is delaying shipments as tariff rates fluctuate. Kadidja Dosso, 30, owner of Dosso Beauty, which sells hypoallergenic braiding hair, as well as The Dosso Hair Salon in Philadelphia, has also faced delayed shipments on imports from China. She waited over a month to get $50,000 worth of China-made braiding hair via air freight at John F. Kennedy Airport in June, when U.S. President Donald Trump announced 145% tariffs on the country over confusion over what tariff should apply. 'We have to provide more specifics of the products – exact materials, the product use – for it to clear customs,' Dosso said. 'Part of the issue was that the same language that we've been using for years wasn't descriptive enough.' She wants to avoid raising prices on her $13 packets of hair, which customers typically buy at least five at a time to complete one hairstyle. Higher costs Tariffs are disproportionately impacting Black business owners like Blackshear-Calloway and Dosso, said Andre Perry, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. 'Many Black entrepreneurs started off with less wealth,' Perry said. He said that the wealth gap puts Black entrepreneurs, especially those in low-margin businesses like consumer goods or hair care services, into precarious financial positions as tariffs eat into their bottom lines. Sina Golara, an assistant professor of supply chain and operations management at Georgia State University, said rising costs due to tariffs are 'like a tax that you're imposing on business.' 'In some cases, it could be borne by the foreign manufacturer, but in most cases, it will also have quite a substantial impact on the domestic buyers and consumers,' Golara said. Diann Valentine, 55, founder of Slayyy Hair, first felt the impact of tariffs shortly after the initial 145% tariff was imposed on China and she faced a $300,000 bill to get 26,000 units of braiding hair out of the Los Angeles port in May. 'To lose that kind of money at this stage has been devastating,' Valentine said. Since then she has raised the price of her braiding hair and drawstring ponytail extensions by 20%. She also laid off four employees and is working 16-hour days to compensate in her two Glow+Flow beauty supply stores in Inglewood and Hawthorne, California. Slayyy Hair supplies $8.49 nontoxic braiding hair and $35.99 synthetic drawstring ponytails to TJ Maxx and Marshalls, which have resisted renegotiating prices or delivery deadlines to compensate. 'So essentially, we paid more for our ponytails than TJ Maxx and Marshalls paid for them,' Valentine said. She is also trying to renegotiate price increases with Target, where she sells in at least 70 stores in California, Nevada and Colorado, she said. TJ Maxx and Marshalls declined a Reuters request for comment. Fifty percent of the merchandise comes from China, Valentine said, and prices for synthetic wigs, human-hair weaves, plastic hair rollers, rubber bands, combs and brushes that stock her shelves are trending up at her beauty supply locations. 'I thought maybe we would see an increase in foot traffic because there would be more DIY hairstyles – more women doing their hair at home,' she said. 'But for right now, we've only seen decreased foot traffic and also a decrease in frequency of visits from our existing customers.' Struggling salons While beauty product sales are typically resilient during economic downturns, beauty services are seen as discretionary, said Marley Brocker, senior analyst at market research firm IBISWorld. 'Tariffs on those imports are going to directly lead to higher costs for those service providers, whether they're buying directly from overseas manufacturers or buying from wholesalers within the U.S.,' she said. Black U.S. consumers spent approximately $2.29 billion on hair care products in 2022, according to a NielsenIQ study from that year. But higher prices are causing some Black women to visit the salon less frequently. Deiara Frye, 27, of Raleigh, North Carolina, usually schedules hair appointments at least five times a year, but so far this year she's only gone once. 'Due to the cost of everything rising over the years, I tend to get braids a little more often now than sew-ins, or try to maintain my natural hair,' she said. She's also seeing prices for her natural hair products like Unilever's Shea Moisture and Procter & Gamble's Pantene go up. Fewer visits are impacting salons and beauty supply stores. Until earlier this year, Dionne Maxwell was selling wigs, braiding hair, shampoos, and conditioners out of her mini beauty supply store in Dallas, Georgia, located 33 miles outside of Atlanta, but she shut it down after she started losing foot traffic in May and moved operations into her home. Now she's relying on orders placed through Uber Eats, TikTok Shop and to sustain her business, but even those sales have slowed significantly, she said. 'We don't have the money for advertising, because enough revenue is not coming in to advertise with,' Maxwell said. Tariffs have raised Maxwell's wholesale price for China-made braiding hair by 50 cents per pack, she said, and she is now required to buy more hair in her wholesale orders. She said she's struggled to negotiate better prices with her hair wholesalers, who are requiring her to order more units of merchandise at higher costs. Her wholesaler is asking her to purchase 110 packs of hair per order, when she was previously able to buy 30 packs at a time, she said. 'For the past two months, we have been basically paying our bills out of pocket because we really have had nothing coming in,' Maxwell said.
