Mylan clarifies $104 profit on $600 EpiPens

Mylan (NSDQ:MYL) acknowledged that the $104 profit it reported to Congress included taxes, after the Wall Street Journal reported that the company applied the statutory U.S. tax rate of 37.5% to calculate its profits for testimony before the Senate, according to Reuters.

“Without the tax-related reduction, Mylan’s profits on the EpiPen 2-pack would be closer to $160, or 60% higher than the figure the company gave Congress,” the journal reported.

The company came under fire in August for raising the price of its epinephrine auto-injector to $600, more than 500%, since it acquired the device in 2007. Last week, Mylan CEO Heather Bresch testified before the Senate after politicians called for the company to be more transparent with its pricing strategy.

Mylan filed a profitability analysis with the SEC today which detailed the tremendous growth the company has seen with the EpiPen since 2008. In 2008, Mylan sold $184 million worth of EpiPens, or 4.3 million pens. That’s projected to double by the end of 2016, to $1.1 billion.

In 2008, net product profitability rang in at $3 million. Mylan predicts that by the end of 2016, EpiPen will bring in $419 million in net profitability. The profit margin has also grown in the past 8 years, from 57.1% in 2008 to 75% this year.

“Following Mylan’s recent testimony before the United States House of Representatives regarding EpiPen, Mylan is providing this analysis of the profitability in the United States of EpiPen as a supplement to its testimony,” the company wrote in the filing. “Mylan does not regularly provide profitability analyses for individual products and does not intend in the future to provide product level profitability analysis for EpiPen or to update this analysis.”

“We didn’t believe Mylan’s numbers last week during their CEO’s testimony, and we don’t believe them this week either,” Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, said in a statement.

Mylan said yesterday that it is standard practice to include taxes in a profitability analysis. Mylan’s overall effective tax rate was 7.4% in 2015, according to the SEC filing.