ICN Pharmaceuticals Reports $65-Million Loss for Year : Earnings: Company's sales rose to $551.8 million but a subsidiary, ICN Biomedicals, had to take a $73-million accounting charge.

ICN Pharmaceuticals Reports $65-Million Loss for Year : Earnings: Company’s sales rose to $551.8 million but a subsidiary, ICN Biomedicals, had to take a $73-million accounting charge.

By MICHAEL FLAGG

April 2, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

COSTA MESA — Drug and health-care concern ICN Pharmaceuticals Inc. said Thursday that it lost $65 million, or $4.67 a share, last year. That contrasted with a profit of $5.9 million, or 40 cents a share, for 1991.

Annual sales rose to $551.8 million from $460.4 million.

ICN blamed the loss on a publicly traded subsidiary, ICN Biomedicals Inc., which had to take a $73-million accounting charge against earnings in the fourth quarter.

The company had announced the huge non-cash charge earlier, and a big loss had been expected.

ICN Biomedicals had to write off the difference between the $41.5 million it paid for Flow Laboratories nearly four years ago and what Flow’s assets are worth now. ICN Biomedicals also had to reduce the value on its books of “obsolete and slow-moving inventory,” most of it owned by Flow, a Virginia company that develops drugs.

All but 12% of ICN Biomedicals’ stock is owned by parent ICN Pharmaceuticals. Biomedicals makes biotechnology research products and medical diagnostics.

Last year, Biomedicals lost $87.4 million, or $4.80 a share, on $75.6 million in sales. The previous year it lost $12.9 million, or $1.09 a share, on sales of $96.5 million.

But the write-down, its parent company said in a press release Thursday, is “expected to reposition that business for competitive growth in the future.”

The parent company, based in Costa Mesa, took $21.6 million in losses when theYugoslav currency, the dinar, was devalued. ICN owns 45% of a Yugoslav drug company, SPI Pharmaceuticals Inc., which saw its own sales jump 31% to $476 million last year, accounting for most of ICN’s rise in sales.

Another unit of ICN Pharmaceuticals reported 1992 results Thursday. Drug company Viratek Inc., 70% of which is owned by ICN, earned $1.8 million on sales of $5.4 million. The previous year, the company reported earnings of $3.6 million on sales of $4.5 million.

Viratek blamed this year’s lower earnings on increased spending for research on a hepatitis drug.