Topic: How To Invest

Dividend Advisor Hotline – Friday, December 10, 2021

Article Excerpt

PFIZER INC., $52.78, New York symbol PFE, is a top pick for 2021. The company is one of the world’s largest makers of prescription drugs. Its top-selling brands include Lyrica (epilepsy), Celebrex (arthritis pain), Prevnar (pneumonia) and Enbrel (rheumatoid arthritis). With the March 2022 payment, Pfizer will raise your quarterly dividend by 2.6%. Investors will then receive $0.40 a share instead of $0.39. The new annual rate of $1.60 yields a solid 3.0%. The company now plans to produce 80 million treatment courses of its experimental COVID-19 pill (called Paxlovid) in 2022. That’s up from its earlier target of 50 million. Each course consists of 20 Paxlovid pills plus 10 doses of ritonavir (a drug that helps slow the breakdown of Paxlovid in the body). It’s taken over five days. Even though regulators have yet to approve the new drug, the U.S. government has agreed to pay Pfizer $5.29 billion for 10 million courses. As well, Pfizer and German drugmaker BioNTech (Nasdaq symbol BNTX) are developing…