April 23 (Bloomberg) -- Amgen Inc., the world’s largest biotechnology company, said first-quarter profit fell 7.4 percent, as revenue from its anemia drugs continued to fall and its top-selling drug for arthritis was hurt by the economy.

Net income fell to $1.02 billion, or 98 cents a share, from $1.10 billion, or $1.01, a year earlier, the Thousand Oaks, California-based company said in a statement today. Earnings, excluding certain costs, missed the $1.14 a share average estimate of 18 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

Revenue dropped 8.4 percent to $3.31 billion. Amgen’s best- seller Enbrel fell 20 percent to $758 million. Amgen’s anemia drugs have declined for two years, and analysts’ forecast further sales dips in the first quarter. The size of Enbrel’s decline was sharper than forecast and raises new challenges for the company, analysts said.

“Amgen reported perhaps its ugliest quarter ever,” Mark Schoenebaum, an analyst at Deutsche Bank in New York, wrote in a note to investors after the earnings report. “All major products were significantly short of consensus expectations.”

The U.S. recession contributed to the decline in prescriptions for Enbrel, Amgen Chief Executive Officer Kevin Sharer said in a telephone conference call with analysts.

“The biopharmaceutical industry is not exempt from these challenges,” Sharer said. “In America, patients are postponing doctors’ visits and are not always taking medicine on the prescribed schedule.”

Insurance Coverage

Sharer said some patients can’t afford insurance co- payments for medications, such as Enbrel, which is usually prescribed in doctors’ offices rather than hospitals.

Drugmakers can expect to ring up $70 billion less in sales than previously forecast for 2009, largely due to the weak U.S. economy and the rising value of the U.S. dollar, according to an April 22 report by IMS Health Inc., a Norwalk, Connecticut-based research company.

Amgen has said it hopes to ignite sales with new drugs such as denosumab, which is awaiting approval by U.S. and European regulators for use in osteoporosis.

Sales of Amgen’s anemia drug Aranesp fell 18 percent to $626 million in the quarter. Epogen, an older drug for patients with chronic kidney disease, gained 2 percent from a year earlier to $565 million. Demand for Amgen’s anemia products began faltering in late 2007 after studies linked the medications to heart attack, stroke and death.

Shares Decline

The shares fell as much as $1.32, or 2.8 percent, to $45.50 in extended Nasdaq Stock Market trading.

Enbrel’s first-quarter sales decline, from $951 million during the same period a year ago, reflected falling demand and reductions in wholesalers’ inventories, the company said in its statement.

“The primary driver is macroeconomic factors,” said Robert Bradway, Amgen’s chief financial officer. “We do expect Enbrel to maintain its leadership position,” in the market, he said.

Analysts at Jefferies & Co. and Lazard Capital Markets recently reduced their first-quarter Enbrel sales estimates to a range of $850 million to $860 million.

Sales of Neulasta, a drug used to fight infections in patients undergoing chemotherapy, fell 1 percent to $1.07 billion.

Amgen maintained its 2009 annual forecast of $4.55 a share to $4.75 a share. The company lowered its sales estimate to a range of $14.4 billion to $14.8 billion, from $14.8 billion to $15.2 billion previously. Amgen had sales of $15 billion in 2008.

“Expectations were very low here,” Eric Schmidt, an analyst with Cowen & Co., said today in a telephone interview. The combined sales declines of Enbrel and Aranesp, he said, “didn’t make for a pretty quarter.”

To contact the reporter on this story: David Olmos in San Francisco at dolmos@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: April 23, 2009 20:45 EDT