Pharma Industry Archive

Sanofi-Aventis’s Q4 earnings call tomorrow could set the stage for a dramatic few days at the company, according to Bloomberg, as CEO Chris Viehbacher told analysts and his staff that Sanofi needs to cut operating costs and possibly buy a small or midsize firm. Viehbacher wants to get $1.3 billion in cuts out of his operation. Sanofi staff, who already saw a round of layoffs in December,...

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Lawyers for Wyeth have informed the US Supreme Court of the merger with Pfizer, in case the justices now have a conflicts in Wyeth v. Levine. Chief Justice John Roberts usually recuses himself in cases regarding Pfizer, according to the Mass Tort Litigation Blog. He owns Pfizer stock. But Roberts already heard arguments in Wyeth v. Levine, the difficult case which could decide whether federal...

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Pfizer is polling about 250 members of the media to find out whether its PR operations are any good. The move appears to be part of Pfizer PR chief Ray Kerins’ drive to change Pfizer’s image from a Kremlin-esque castle of puzzles into a more communicative, forthright enterprise. Kerins recently complained about Pfizer’s now-discontinued “unwritten rule” of not...

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Angry investor Jack Schuler is firing at Elan once again. The FT reports he’s trying to block the sale of 19-25 percent of the company to outside investors. Roche is reportedly interested. Instead, Schuler wants Elan’s management replaced with people who actually have experience in commercializing drugs. In response, Elan’s management claim that they’re perfectly...

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The top five executives at Wyeth will receive $75 million between them in the Pfizer acquisition, according to an analysis by Equilar, a corporate compensation consultancy. The jackpot payouts come as their plan calls for 19,500 of their colleagues to be made jobless, and the merger they negotiated was paid for with $22.5 billion in taxpayer money. According to Equilar, a compensation analyst:...

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GlaxoSmithKline parceled out the legal locations of 40 drug brand names to various foreign countries such as Ireland and Puerto Rico in an effort to reduce the amount of tax it pays in the US and the UK, according to the Guardian. The result, the paper says is: Glaxo pays on average more than 80% of its tax to overseas countries rather than to Britain. Last year as a result, although the...

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Novartis paid $2.5 million to Colombia rebels who had kidnapped two Novartis employees, according to a documentary on French TV. The issue is a controversial one in Switzerland, where Novartis is based, because the Colombian government had accused a Swiss negotiator of paying the ransom, and then banned the Swiss from participating in negotiations with armed rebels. The new documentary says the...

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Vatican Radio has banned Novartis CEO Daniel Vasella from its airwaves after it learned Novartis makes contraceptives. Vasella had applied to be a Vatican Radio “Commentator of the Week,” according to Reuters, and the station accepted. But the invite was withdrawn after the Pope’s people learned Novartis makes birth control. Vatican Radio said on its website: The approach of...

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Pfizer and Eli Lilly appear to have definitively won the erectile dysfunction war: their respective brands, Viagra and Cialis, both showed sales growth in Q4 2008 and for the full year. Lilly’s growth was slightly faster, but it is coming off a smaller base. Bayer’s brand, Levitra, won’t report Q4 sales until March 3, but its Q3 sales showed a decline and a smaller level of...

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GlaxoSmithKline is to shed another 6,000 to 10,000 jobs as part of a restructuring brought on by the collapse of its sales of Avandia and patent expiries. But it’s not just that. The job losses are also being triggered by the missteps of some as-yet-unnamed GSK execs who triggered an investigation by Colorado officials into “marketing and promotional practices for several products...

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