Has The Story Under Johnson & Johnson Stock Run Out

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Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) stock rose 50.5% in the twelve months to October 29, 2026. The company's sales grew faster during that period than in the prior year, even as STELARA, one of its immunology drugs, lost sales to cheaper copies. Buyers may be betting that newer medicines such as Tremfya keep growing fast enough to lift the whole company. Could you have seen that coming before those twelve months began?

J&J's 2025 Reports Showed Sales Growth Picking Up

You could have seen some of it, starting in J&J's own quarterly reports. In a report filed on April 23, 2025, sales for the quarter ended March 2025 grew 2.4% from a year earlier. That marked a dip from the 5.3% growth in the December 2024 quarter. Three months later, the report for the quarter ended June 2025 showed sales up 5.8%, more than double the March pace.

That pickup was easy to overlook. Much of the summer news surrounding J&J focused on lawsuits over its talc and baby powder products, including a $42 million jury verdict in Boston in July 2025.

Tremfya Won Approval, Then Management Addressed STELARA

On September 19, 2025, J&J won U.S. approval for Tremfya in ulcerative colitis in a form patients can inject themselves from the start of treatment. During its October 14, 2025 call, management said J&J had shown it could "grow through the loss of exclusivity of STELARA", the point at which biosimilars can compete with it. Eight days later, J&J filed its report for the quarter ended September 2025, showing sales growth had risen again, to 6.8%.

J&J's plan and a second straight rise in sales growth were public by late October 2025. Both the call and the filing came in the two weeks before the twelve months measured here, and the stock was already rising: it gained 21.8% in the six months before October 28, 2025.

J&J Stock Ran Well Ahead Of The S&P 500

J&J's rise compares with 13.3% for the S&P 500 over the same twelve months. The move was not J&J's alone, however: Merck returned 73.1% over the same dates, while Eli Lilly returned 68.6%.

Over the four quarters ended September 2026, J&J's sales grew 7.8%, compared with 5.1% in the four quarters before. The medicines business, Innovative Medicine, made up $16.8 billion of J&J's $25.4 billion in sales in the quarter ended September 2026.

Investors were also paying more for each dollar of those sales. At the end of September 2026, the stock was priced at 6.4 times sales, the highest of the 40 quarter ends going back to late 2016.

The more buyers pay for each dollar of sales, the more growth the price needs. A recent example: Tesla is priced at about 13 times sales even though its deliveries fell two years in a row. Read Trefis Big Story: How Tesla Blundered.

J&J's Sales Growth Has Slowed For Two Quarters

J&J's sales growth reached 9.9% in the quarter ended March 2026, then slowed to 6.6% in the June quarter. Sales grew 5.9% in the quarter ended September 2026, coming in below the 6.8% posted for the quarter ended September 2025.

The newer medicines are still growing fast. On the October 13, 2026 call, management said Tremfya sales grew 68.2% in the third quarter, while STELARA fell 5.4%. Innovative Medicine grew 7.9%, compared with 2.5% for MedTech, which management said fell short of its expectations.

With MedTech lagging, the pace of J&J's sales as a whole is the part still in doubt. The number to watch is company-wide sales growth for the December quarter, due when J&J reports in January 2027. J&J also plans to separate its DePuy Synthes orthopaedics business by mid-2027, and charges led by a proposed $5.5 billion talc settlement cut its September-quarter profit to $210 million.

Sitting On A Big Gain In Johnson & Johnson?

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