As the saying goes, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and the pharma industry appears to be at least a partial beneficiary of the current coronavirus pandemic. No longer do the newspaper headlines focus on excessive drug prices: all the attention…
Read MoreSandoz standalone
It is all change at Sandoz this year, as Novartis has executed a 180-degree strategy shift. No longer is it pursuing its previous policy of ever closer union with the innovative pharma division, but instead it now favours far greater autonomy for its generic…
Read MoreHappy returns? Hikma’s R&D formula poses some challenges
At the Hikma investor day at the end of last year, CEO Siggi Olafsson made in interesting observation on the company’s R&D productivity. Noting that Hikma was putting 7% of its turnover into R&D but that the sales from newly-launched products in H1 2018…
Read MoreThe changing of the guard: New CEOs move in
Recent months have seen a slew of management changes at major generics companies. Some of this has been driven by shareholder dissatisfaction with poor performance (Teva being the obvious example here), but there have also been generational and other shifts that offer interesting pointers…
Read MoreHero or zero? Kåre Schultz proposes rational solutions in an irrational market
Teva’s new CEO, Kåre Schultz, has now been in place for just over three months, and at the end of last year, he laid out his plans to deal with Teva’s immediate problems of excessive debt and sliding profitability. The main highlight was massive…
Read MoreOy Vey, Teva!
Things appear to be going from bad to worse at Teva, which is giving the strong impression of being in meltdown. One can only hope that the recent Q2 results, which featured an eye-watering $6.1bn write-down of the company’s recently-acquired Actavis generics assets, mark…
Read MoreBiosimilars: The five stages of grief
According to the Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, grief has five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Although the development of biosimilars should not be an inherently grief-stricken business, it nevertheless appears to be closely following this path, certainly from the perspective of the…
Read MoreUnfair! DoH temper tantrum is no help to generic drug pricing policy in the UK
The UK generics industry has been waiting for over a year to find out what the CMA’s final decision would be on the Pfizer/Flynn phenytoin case, following its preliminary ruling in August 2015 that the two companies were guilty of abuse of a dominant…
Read MoreGoodness gracious me! Time for a management change at Teva
The news earlier this week that Siggi Olafsson is leaving Teva, to be succeeded by Dipankar Bhattacharjee (currently head of Teva Generics Europe) comes as something of a surprise, to say the least. As the architect of Teva’s long drawn-out purchase of Allergan’s generics…
Read MoreThe cuckoo clock ticks for management as Sandoz waits for its biosimilars to make money
At its May ‘Meet the management’ event in Basel, Sandoz was represented by Richard Francis, the MD of the business unit, Peter Goldschmidt, the regional manager for the US and Carol Lynch, head of the biosimilars business. According to Mr Francis, the choice of…
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