SOURCE: AS­SO­CI­AT­ED PRESS

BERLIN (AP) — BioN­Tech, the Ger­man phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny that teamed with Pfiz­er to de­vel­op the first wide­ly used COVID-19 vac­cine, on Wednes­day re­port­ed strong quar­ter­ly earn­ings growth on pan­dem­ic-fu­eled de­mand.

The com­pa­ny post­ed net prof­it of near­ly 3.2 bil­lion eu­ros ($3.6 bil­lion) for the fi­nal three months of 2021, up from 367 mil­lion eu­ros in the same pe­ri­od the pre­vi­ous year. Earn­ings per share rose to 12.18 eu­ros from 1.43 eu­ros a year ago.

Quar­ter­ly rev­enue rose to 5.5 bil­lion eu­ros from 345.4 mil­lion eu­ros pre­vi­ous­ly.

“Our 2021 COVID-19 vac­cine rev­enues were sig­nif­i­cant­ly in­flu­enced by the ex­tra­or­di­nary cir­cum­stances of the on­go­ing pan­dem­ic,” Chief Fi­nan­cial Of­fi­cer Jens Hol­stein said in a press re­lease.

Vac­ci­na­tions with the Pfiz­er-BioN­Tech vac­cine, mar­ket­ed as Comir­naty, start­ed in De­cem­ber 2020. BioN­Tech, based in the city of Mainz near Frank­furt, said about 2.6 bil­lion dos­es of the vac­cine had been de­liv­ered last year.

Heavy de­mand for the vac­cine al­so helped Pfiz­er re­port healthy quar­ter­ly earn­ings last month.

BioN­Tech said it has signed or­ders for 2.4 bil­lion more dos­es so far this year, which it ex­pects will earn the com­pa­ny 13 bil­lion to 17 bil­lion eu­ros in rev­enue.

The com­pa­ny, which has said it will pour wind­fall prof­its from the mR­NA-based coro­n­avirus vac­cine back in­to de­vel­op­ing oth­er drugs to fight can­cer and oth­er dis­eases, plans to boost its spend­ing on re­search and de­vel­op­ment this year by half, to be­tween 1.4 bil­lion and 1.5 bil­lion eu­ros.

BioN­Tech said it’s propos­ing a spe­cial cash div­i­dend of 2 eu­ros per share and will al­so buy back up to $1.5 bil­lion in shares be­cause “we would like to share our suc­cess­es with share­hold­ers.”

For the full year, the com­pa­ny post­ed net prof­it of 10.3 bil­lion eu­ros on 19 bil­lion in rev­enue.