Roch's move was really a surprise

A couple of days ago, I posted about how the people at Genentech were blindsided by Roche's announcement of their intent to acquire the remainder of the outstanding shares of Genentech that Roche did not own.
And I guess it really was a surprise.
Further underscoring how unexpected the move by Roche was....Reuters reported that Arthur Levison, Genentech's CEO, sold 90,000 shares last Friday. If he had held on to those shares even one more day, he would have made substantially more profit...upwards of $1 Million Dollars.

Big Pharma Earnings - BMS to cut $1 Billion more

Tracy Staton at Fierce Biotech writes about the earnings reports that Big Pharma has announced over the last few days. The article is here.
While the news for the companies listed was generally upbeat....buried in the announcements are interesting tidbits such as the fact that Bristol-Myers Squibb is planning to cut another $1 Billion dollars...although the company did not provide any specifics.

These announcements further underscore the trend we have been seeing over the last few years.
Long Term Growth at the Big Pharma firms is a thing of the past. Big Pharma is at a loss to find products that can generate the revenue they need to support and grow their organizations. Big Pharma will not disappear. But going forward...if you are looking for stability and career growth...you are better off at a small or mid-size firms.

I expand on this discussion in a later post.

Roche Bids For Genentech

Roche announced a bid to take over the remaining shares of Genentech that it does not already own. Roche's Chairman of the Board, Franz Humer explains the rationale for the move:

"Our long and successful participation in Genentech has provided great benefits to both of our companies and shareholders. It has resulted in one of the biggest success stories in the healthcare industry. Roche's significant investment in Genentech over many years has helped it to focus on innovation and long-term projects, leading to some of the most important breakthroughs in the treatment of cancer and other life-threatening diseases.

The transaction will create a unique opportunity to evolve Roche's hub-and-spoke model into a structure that allows us to strengthen the focus on innovation and accelerate the search for new solutions for unmet medical needs. Combining the strengths of Roche and Genentech will create significant value and result in benefits for patients, employees and shareholders."

Unfortunately, according to reports, the move by Roche totally blindsided the people at Genentech. I guess the "unique opportunity" and "significant value"that Humer describes above wasn't so obvious to the people at Genentech.

Teva still better than Sandoz?

Back on June 5th, I posted about Daniel Vasella, CEO of Novartis, being quoted as saying,

“Teva is better than we are, and that’s hard to take."

I would love to hear his take on the recent announcement of Teva's acquisition of Barr.
What is he saying now?

Teva to acquire Barr

The world's biggest Generic Pharmaceutical company just got bigger.
You can read about it here.
And the industry consolidation continues. The question remains...Is a bigger company always better? Only time will tell.

Pfizer layoffs

Derek Lowe writes in his blog, In The Pipeline, that there are rumors that Pfizer in Groton is slated for layoffs. You can read his post here.
One significant difference about this projected layoff is that:

"...this is going to hit both PhD and associate chemists, as opposed to some earlier reorganizations there which mostly seemed to let lab heads go."

Derek goes on to write about Pfizer:

"It’s going to be a tough place to work, and it’s going to be a tough stock to own. If you have a chance to do anything about either of those situations, I’d look into it."

Big Pharma is sure turning out to be a tough place to be. Fortunately there are a number of smaller and mid-size companies that are growing and that are actually turning out to be great places to work. I will discuss why this trend is occurring in the Pharma industry in a future post.