TOKYO: Japan's top drugmaker on Friday reported an annual loss for the first time in its history after agreeing to pay $2.4 billion to settle US lawsuits over cancer claims regarding its Actos diabetes drug.
Osaka-based Takeda($1.22 billion) as it took huge charges to settle the claims, reversing a year earlier profit and marking its only loss since becoming a publicly listed company in 1949.
But revenue grew 5.1 percent to 1.78 trillion yen, helped by a weaker yen as well as higher-than expected sales of gout and myeloma cancer drugs. The firm said it expects to swing to a 68 billion yen profit this year.
Takeda warned last month it would report a big loss after announcing the US settlement agreement, which resolves lawsuits representing some 8,000 people who used the treatment for Type 2 diabetes beginning in the late 1990s.
They claimed the company did not warn them that it increases the risks of cancer.
Takeda said it agreed to pay out $2.37 billion if 95 percent of the litigants agree to the deal, rising to $2.4 billion if the number rises to 97 percent or more.
The company has nevertheless said it believes the claims of the litigants "are without merit and does not admit liability".
Actos continues to be available in the United States, Japan and other countries.
"The settlement will reduce financial uncertainties for the company and provides a significant degree of assurance toward resolving a high percentage of the Actos product liability claims," it said last month.
Last year a federal jury in the state of Louisiana ordered Takeda and US-based Eli Lilly & Co. to pay a combined $9.0 billion in punitive damages to a patient who said Actos had caused his bladder cancer.
A judge later slashed the payout to $36.8 million.
Eli Lilly was Takeda's US marketing and sales partner until 2006, with the US firm keeping the rights to sell Actos in parts of Asia and Europe, as well as in Canada and Mexico.
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