Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) is scheduled to release its fiscal first-quarter financial results before the markets open on Tuesday. Analysts anticipate $1.99 in earnings per share (EPS) and $19.44 billion in revenue. The same period of last year reportedly had $2.10 in EPS and $20.02 billion in revenue.

Johnson & Johnson is one of the largest health care companies in the fight against the coronavirus. This pharmaceutical giant announced in late-March the selection of a lead COVID-19 vaccine candidate from constructs that it has been working on since January 2020.

This came with the significant expansion of the existing partnership between the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), as well as the rapid scaling of the company’s manufacturing capacity with the goal of providing global supply of more than a billion doses of a vaccine.

The company expects to initiate human clinical studies of its lead vaccine candidate at the latest by September 2020 and anticipates the first batches of a COVID-19 vaccine could be available for emergency use authorization in early 2021, a substantially accelerated timeframe in comparison to the typical vaccine development process.

Here’s what a few analysts were saying about Johnson & Johnson ahead of the report:

• Raymond James has an Outperform rating with a $153 price target.
• Leerink has an Outperform rating and a $160 target price.
• Cantor Fitzgerald has a Buy rating with a $168 price target.
• Wells Fargo rates it as Overweight with a $150 price target.
• Stifel’s Hold rating comes with a $140 target price.
• Morgan Stanley has an Overweight rating and a $160 price target.

Excluding Monday’s move, Johnson & Johnson stock has outperformed the broad markets with a decline of 3% year to date. In the past 52 weeks, the share price is actually up about 4%.

Johnson & Johnson stock traded down about 1.5% to $139.01 on Monday, in a 52-week range of $109.16 to $154.50. The consensus price target is $155.65.

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