AbbVie's earnings guide sits $0.50 below February's on research charges and the Apogee deal

AbbVie raised its adjusted earnings guidance for 2026 again in its third-quarter results, to a midpoint of $13.97 a share. That is the same midpoint it set in July, and $0.50 below the $14.47 it guided in February. Both readings are true. The gap is this year's charges for purchased research and milestones, plus the dilution from the Apogee acquisition, partly offset by a rising outlook for the medicines it already sells.

The mechanism is an accounting choice. When AbbVie licenses or buys an experimental drug, the upfront and milestone payments for that research are charged against earnings as they are made, and the company keeps them in its adjusted figures. Its guidance leaves out any such charge it has not yet incurred. So each quarter's charges lower the full-year number after the fact. Through September those charges cost $0.69 a share. The third quarter's share was $0.11, exactly the amount by which management lifted the range this time, which is why the midpoint ended where July's did.

The year's other subtraction came in July, when management took out $0.14 a share for the expected dilution from buying Apogee Therapeutics, an immunology developer whose acquisition has since closed. Against those costs, the company added to the outlook for its existing business at each update: $0.12 in April, $0.10 in July and $0.11 now, or $0.33 in all. Start from February's midpoint, take away the purchased research and the Apogee dilution, add the raises, and the result is the current midpoint to the cent.

The margin guide tells the same story. Management said its expected adjusted operating margin for the year now carries roughly 1.8 percentage points of purchased research costs. Adding those back to the current guide gives 48.5%, the figure it guided in February. Because the company called the charge roughly 1.8 points, that match is approximate rather than exact.

Revenue, which these charges do not touch, has moved the same way. The company now expects about $0.8 billion more in 2026 sales than it guided in February, and sales came in above its own guide in the first, second and third quarters. Skyrizi, its largest immunology drug, brought in $5.8 billion last quarter, and US regulators approved a starting dose of it for Crohn's disease that patients receive as an injection under the skin.

Two things sit outside the guidance figure. The fourth-quarter outlook assumes no further purchased research, so any deal AbbVie pays for before the year ends would lower the full-year result after the fact, as this year's charges have. The second is debt. A year ago management said it was on track to bring its net leverage ratio down to 2x by the end of 2026. In July, with Apogee agreed, it reset that to within two to three years of the deal closing, and it repeated the longer horizon now that the acquisition is complete.