Pfizer

Pfizer Inc. is an American biopharmaceutical company, headquartered in New York City, that develops, makes and sells medicines and vaccines. It traces its origins to 1849, when the cousins Charles Pfizer and Charles Erhart started a chemical business in Brooklyn. In 2025 Pfizer reported total revenues of $62.6 billion and said it employed approximately 75,000 people worldwide at year end.

History of Pfizer

Charles Pfizer and Charles Erhart were German immigrants who founded Charles Pfizer & Company in a brick building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 1849. Their first successful product was a palatable form of santonin, a drug used against intestinal worms. Pfizer was a chemist and Erhart a former confectioner, and the product was sweetened so that it tasted like almond toffee instead of bitter medicine.

The American Civil War increased demand for products such as borax, camphor and iodine, and the company hired about 150 more employees. In 1868 it moved its headquarters to Maiden Lane in Manhattan while keeping manufacturing in Brooklyn. It began producing citric acid from imported citrus concentrates in 1880. When World War I disrupted its supply of fruit, the food chemist James Currie developed a fermentation process using a mold, and by the mid-1920s citric acid made from sugar had pushed the price down from $1.25 a pound to 20 cents.

That fermentation expertise mattered again in the 1940s. In 1941 the United States government asked companies to speed up production of penicillin, which Alexander Fleming had discovered in 1928 (see discovery of penicillin). Pfizer converted an ice factory in Brooklyn into a penicillin plant using deep-tank fermentation, with fourteen tanks of 7,500 gallons each. By the mid-1940s it was reported to be the largest penicillin producer in the world, and the American Chemical Society designated the Marcy Avenue facility a National Historic Chemical Landmark in 2008.

The company released Terramycin, a broad-spectrum antibiotic, in 1950, and this was the first pharmaceutical sold in the United States under the Pfizer label. It changed its name from Charles Pfizer & Company to Pfizer Inc. in 1970 and passed $1 billion in sales two years later. Later landmark drugs included Lipitor, Viagra and Zoloft. Pfizer closed its Brooklyn plant in 2007, ending operations there after more than 150 years.

Products and services of Pfizer

Pfizer describes itself as a science-driven global biopharmaceutical company. Most of its revenues come from making and selling biopharmaceutical products, which include prescription medicines and vaccines. In 2025 it managed its commercial operations through three operating segments, Biopharma, PC1 and Pfizer Ignite, and Biopharma was the only reportable segment.

Its best-known recent products are linked to COVID-19. Comirnaty, a vaccine developed in a collaboration with BioNTech, uses mRNA vaccine technology, and Paxlovid is its oral COVID-19 treatment. Pfizer’s annual report warns that demand for these products may stay lower than in earlier years as COVID-19 remains endemic and seasonal.

The company also depends on oncology, which it expanded through acquisition. On December 14, 2023, it acquired Seagen, a biotechnology company that develops cancer medicines, for $229 per share in cash, with a total fair value of consideration of $44.2 billion. On November 13, 2025, it acquired Metsera, a clinical-stage company working on obesity and cardiometabolic medicines, for $65.60 per share in cash plus a contingent value right of up to $20.65 per share tied to three milestones.

Corporate structure and operations

Pfizer’s principal executive offices are at 66 Hudson Boulevard East in New York City. Its fiscal year ends December 31 for U.S. subsidiaries and November 30 for subsidiaries outside the United States. In 2025, 41 percent of total revenues, or $25.5 billion, came from outside the United States, including 21 percent from Europe and 12 percent from China, Japan and the rest of the Asia Pacific region. China was its largest market outside the United States in 2025 and 2024.

The share of revenue earned abroad has shifted over time. International revenues were 53 percent of the total in 2023, 39 percent in 2024 and 41 percent in 2025, according to the filing. Revenues from outside the United States exceeded $500 million in 12 countries in 2025.

Pfizer states that its 2026 priorities are to maximize the value of key transactions, deliver on research milestones, invest for growth after 2028 and scale artificial intelligence across the business. At the start of 2026 it also moved certain off-patent injectables and biosimilars into a new Global Hospital and Biosimilars organization within Biopharma. It has been running a multi-year program to realign its cost base since the fourth quarter of 2023.

Impact of Pfizer

Pfizer’s wartime penicillin work is a standard example of how industrial fermentation turned a laboratory finding into a medicine that could be made at scale. The same capability, applied to citric acid, vitamin C and other products, helped make the company a supplier to food and drug makers as well as to patients.

More recently, Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine collaboration with BioNTech made it one of the most visible companies in the pandemic response. Many of its medicines are developed through a long clinical trial process, and the company’s annual report notes that patents, competition and pricing pressure from governments and managed care organizations all affect its results. Readers should treat all dated figures here as of 2025 and check the latest annual report on Form 10-K for updates.

Challenges and constraints

Pfizer’s annual report lists several business risks. Medicines lose revenue when patents expire and generic or biosimilar competitors enter, and the report discusses pricing pressures from managed care organizations and government regulation of prices. It also says that if COVID-19 infection patterns do not follow past trends, demand for its COVID-19 products may stay reduced.

These are risks described by the company in its regulatory filing, not findings by outside reviewers. The filing also covers legal proceedings and environmental matters in separate sections, which readers can consult for details on specific disputes.

Editorially reviewed by Specialty Digest Editorial TeamLast reviewed November 4, 2026Researched and drafted with AI assistanceReport an issue