Merck & Company Inc (MRK) Stock Research Report

The medicine that carries Merck

If you have a teenager, a doctor has quite possibly offered them Gardasil, a vaccine against the virus behind most cervical cancers. Gardasil is made by Merck, which in Europe goes by another name, MSD. Its vaccines sit in doctors' fridges on both sides of the Atlantic.

The medicine that matters most to Merck, though, is one most people meet only when someone close to them falls ill. Keytruda is a cancer treatment: it helps the body's own defenses find and attack tumors. Today it brings in about half of everything Merck sells.

In the United States, Keytruda still enjoys protection, that is, years in which rivals cannot copy it and the government does not set its price. That protection starts to wear away late in this decade, on dates already fixed. Merck has launched new medicines and bought others to prepare. Can those medicines grow large enough in time?

What the Company Does

Merck makes medicines and vaccines, and most of its revenue comes from treating people. Patients, however, rarely pay Merck directly. The company sells its medicines to drug wholesalers, pharmacies, hospitals and government agencies, and to the firms that decide which drugs a health plan will cover. Its vaccines go mainly to doctors, distributors and governments.

A few drugs follow a different arrangement. Merck sells them together with partner companies, and for those it records only its share of the profits rather than the full sales.

Keytruda towers over everything else. In 2025 it earned $31.7 billion. Merck now also sells a version of Keytruda injected under the skin instead of through a drip. Gardasil, the next largest product, earned $5.2 billion.

Behind these two come younger medicines: a treatment for high blood pressure in the arteries of the lungs, a vaccine against the bacteria behind many pneumonias, and a medicine for kidney cancer. The lung treatment, the most successful of the three, brought in $1.4 billion.

A smaller business serves animals and earned $6.4 billion. A dog owner who buys a chewable tablet against fleas and ticks at the vet is a Merck customer. So is a cattle farmer who tags each animal with a device that tracks its health.

Merck has also been buying other drug companies since October 2025. The largest purchase, Verona Pharma, cost $10.4 billion in cash. It brought Merck a medicine for COPD, a lung disease that makes breathing steadily harder. Even so, every one of Merck's newer products remains small beside Keytruda.

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Producer and publisher: Francesco Monterosso · ReasyPort
Financial information reference: 2026-03-31
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Merck & Company Inc (MRK) - Stock report