OTTAWA – Every COVID-19 vaccine maker Canada signed a contract with last summer was asked if they could make the doses in Canada and all of them concluded they could not, Procurement Minister Anita Anand said Thursday.
Anand told the House of Commons industry committee that her department “proactively and repeatedly approached leading vaccine manufacturers” about the matter.
“We took this issue up with suppliers at every turn at the negotiating table to discern whether they would come to the table with this possibility of domestic biomanufacturing,” Anand said.
“The manufacturers reviewed the identified assets here in Canada and concluded that biomanufacturing capacity in this country, at the time of contract, which was last August and September, was too limited to justify the investment of capital and expertise to start manufacturing in Canada.”
Many of the COVID-19 vaccine makers sought partners to help produce their product. Moderna signed a 10-year exclusivity agreement with Swiss manufacturer Lonza to make its vaccine. AstraZeneca sought deals with multiple countries to produce its vaccine last summer and fall, including China, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, India and South Korea.
NDP MP Don Davies questioned why Canada isn’t among them, and Anand said “I raised this issue personally with AstraZeneca last August.”
A spokesman for AstraZeneca confirmed Anand’s statements related to its vaccine, known as AZD1222.
“During the course of our discussions with the Canadian government, we reviewed in-country manufacturing capability and available capacity against the technical requirements for AZD1222,” said Carlo Mastrangelo, AstraZeneca’s director of corporate communications and sustainability.
“After discussion with the government and our technical experts, we agreed that the fastest and most effective option to ensure timely Canadian supply of AZD1222 was to leverage an existing supply chain that was already established and beginning the qualification process.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced earlier this week Canada has a new contract with Maryland-based Novavax to eventually make doses of its vaccine at a new National Research Council facility going up in Montreal.
Novavax CEO Stanley Erck said in a statement his company sees the deal with Canada as “an important step forward in our quest to deliver an urgently needed safe and effective vaccine.”
“The memorandum of understanding also includes a broader intention for the government of Canada and Novavax to work together to increase the company’s Canadian presence,” he said.
But the new NRC building won’t be finished until the summer and the new doses are not likely to start being pumped out until late fall at the earliest, long after Canada expects to import enough doses to vaccinate the entire population.
Vaccine manufacturing will be newly available at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan next year, and at Precision Nanosystems in British Columbia in 2023. But none of that helps Canada make doses of COVID-19 vaccines today, and the delays to Canada’s shipments continue.
Delays getting Lonza’s second and third production line up and running in Switzerland is blamed for Moderna’s smaller deliveries this month. Moderna was to deliver 230,000 doses to Canada this week, but 180,000 arrived Thursday morning instead.
A spokeswoman for the company says it will still deliver two million doses total by the end of March. The company has delivered about half a million thus far, leaving 1.5 million for the only two shipments planned after this week before that deadline.
But Maj.-Gen. Dany Fortin, the military commander managing logistics of vaccine deliveries for the Public Health Agency of Canada, said Thursday Canada doesn’t expect to get the 249,600 doses it was initially allocated for the Feb. 22 shipment either.
That comes after a month of smaller shipments from Pfizer-BioNTech, which was supposed to deliver more than 1.1 million doses between Jan. 18 and Feb. 14, and instead is delivering fewer than 340,000.
Fortin said Pfizer is resuming more normal shipments on Feb. 15, with 335,000 doses coming that week, and almost 400,000 the week after.
Provincial governments are expressing their exasperation with the vaccine supply shortages and the lack of clear information from Ottawa about what is coming and when.
“I have advocated for both a consistent supply of vaccines and a consistent supply of information,” Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe said
“Unfortunately, we continue to get neither.”
He said he would push Trudeau to do better during the weekly first ministers’ phone call later Thursday.
After that call, a federal official said Trudeau assured premiers that despite the uncertainty over the supply of vaccines from week to week, Pfizer and Moderna continue to promise that Canada will receive six million doses by the end of March, as they contracted to do.
He also told premiers that the federal government is sharing all information it gets from the companies about the vaccine supply as soon as it receives it and is holding nothing back, according to the official, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly about the call.
Canada’s reliance on foreign production of vaccines came to the forefront in the last week when Europe – where all of Canada’s current vaccines are made – imposed export controls to protect their own supplies. Europe has assured Canada it won’t affect Canada’s shipments and Anand said so far that is true.
Canada’s shipments from Pfizer and Moderna this week were allowed to go out, and Anand said next week’s Pfizer shipment has been approved as well.
Canada is also going to get fewer than 500,000 doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine this winter, after believing just two days ago it could be more than twice that. Those doses are coming from the global vaccine initiative known as the COVAX Facility but can’t be released until the World Health Organization approves AstraZeneca’s vaccine.
Dr. Seth Berkley, the CEO of Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, which is one of the COVAX’s coordinators, said some doses are now not coming until the summer because of a delay getting that approval from WHO.
Canada should get about 475,000 doses before the end of March, and another 1.4 million by the end of June, pending approval of the AstraZeneca vaccine by WHO and Health Canada. Both are expected imminently.
Canada has also ordered 20 million doses from AstraZeneca directly, but Fortin was tight-lipped about when any of those doses will arrive.
“We are planning a number of contingencies,” he said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 4, 2021.
TOKYO (AP) — Japanese technology group SoftBank swung back to profitability in the July-September quarter, boosted by positive results in its Vision Fund investments.
Tokyo-based SoftBank Group Corp. reported Tuesday a fiscal second quarter profit of nearly 1.18 trillion yen ($7.7 billion), compared with a 931 billion yen loss in the year-earlier period.
Quarterly sales edged up about 6% to nearly 1.77 trillion yen ($11.5 billion).
SoftBank credited income from royalties and licensing related to its holdings in Arm, a computer chip-designing company, whose business spans smartphones, data centers, networking equipment, automotive, consumer electronic devices, and AI applications.
The results were also helped by the absence of losses related to SoftBank’s investment in office-space sharing venture WeWork, which hit the previous fiscal year.
WeWork, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2023, emerged from Chapter 11 in June.
SoftBank has benefitted in recent months from rising share prices in some investment, such as U.S.-based e-commerce company Coupang, Chinese mobility provider DiDi Global and Bytedance, the Chinese developer of TikTok.
SoftBank’s financial results tend to swing wildly, partly because of its sprawling investment portfolio that includes search engine Yahoo, Chinese retailer Alibaba, and artificial intelligence company Nvidia.
SoftBank makes investments in a variety of companies that it groups together in a series of Vision Funds.
The company’s founder, Masayoshi Son, is a pioneer in technology investment in Japan. SoftBank Group does not give earnings forecasts.
Shopify Inc. executives brushed off concerns that incoming U.S. President Donald Trump will be a major detriment to many of the company’s merchants.
“There’s nothing in what we’ve heard from Trump, nor would there have been anything from (Democratic candidate) Kamala (Harris), which we think impacts the overall state of new business formation and entrepreneurship,” Shopify’s chief financial officer Jeff Hoffmeister told analysts on a call Tuesday.
“We still feel really good about all the merchants out there, all the entrepreneurs that want to start new businesses and that’s obviously not going to change with the administration.”
Hoffmeister’s comments come a week after Trump, a Republican businessman, trounced Harris in an election that will soon return him to the Oval Office.
On the campaign trail, he threatened to impose tariffs of 60 per cent on imports from China and roughly 10 per cent to 20 per cent on goods from all other countries.
If the president-elect makes good on the promise, many worry the cost of operating will soar for companies, including customers of Shopify, which sells e-commerce software to small businesses but also brands as big as Kylie Cosmetics and Victoria’s Secret.
These merchants may feel they have no choice but to pass on the increases to customers, perhaps sparking more inflation.
If Trump’s tariffs do come to fruition, Shopify’s president Harley Finkelstein pointed out China is “not a huge area” for Shopify.
However, “we can’t anticipate what every presidential administration is going to do,” he cautioned.
He likened the uncertainty facing the business community to the COVID-19 pandemic where Shopify had to help companies migrate online.
“Our job is no matter what comes the way of our merchants, we provide them with tools and service and support for them to navigate it really well,” he said.
Finkelstein was questioned about the forthcoming U.S. leadership change on a call meant to delve into Shopify’s latest earnings, which sent shares soaring 27 per cent to $158.63 shortly after Tuesday’s market open.
The Ottawa-based company, which keeps its books in U.S. dollars, reported US$828 million in net income for its third quarter, up from US$718 million in the same quarter last year, as its revenue rose 26 per cent.
Revenue for the period ended Sept. 30 totalled US$2.16 billion, up from US$1.71 billion a year earlier.
Subscription solutions revenue reached US$610 million, up from US$486 million in the same quarter last year.
Merchant solutions revenue amounted to US$1.55 billion, up from US$1.23 billion.
Shopify’s net income excluding the impact of equity investments totalled US$344 million for the quarter, up from US$173 million in the same quarter last year.
Daniel Chan, a TD Cowen analyst, said the results show Shopify has a leadership position in the e-commerce world and “a continued ability to gain market share.”
In its outlook for its fourth quarter of 2024, the company said it expects revenue to grow at a mid-to-high-twenties percentage rate on a year-over-year basis.
“Q4 guidance suggests Shopify will finish the year strong, with better-than-expected revenue growth and operating margin,” Chan pointed out in a note to investors.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
TORONTO – RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust says it has cut almost 10 per cent of its staff as it deals with a slowdown in the condo market and overall pushes for greater efficiency.
The company says the cuts, which amount to around 60 employees based on its last annual filing, will mean about $9 million in restructuring charges and should translate to about $8 million in annualized cash savings.
The job cuts come as RioCan and others scale back condo development plans as the market softens, but chief executive Jonathan Gitlin says the reductions were from a companywide efficiency effort.
RioCan says it doesn’t plan to start any new construction of mixed-use properties this year and well into 2025 as it adjusts to the shifting market demand.
The company reported a net income of $96.9 million in the third quarter, up from a loss of $73.5 million last year, as it saw a $159 million boost from a favourable change in the fair value of investment properties.
RioCan reported what it says is a record-breaking 97.8 per cent occupancy rate in the quarter including retail committed occupancy of 98.6 per cent.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
