Hints and tips:
...The sale of Meda risks a further hollowing out of Sweden’s pharmaceuticals sector, which in the past two decades has seen Pharmacia bought by Pfizer of the US and Astra merged with Zeneca of the UK....
...The company declined to comment on the Pharmacia deal....
...So has the independence of that country’s entire pharmaceutical sector, with Pharmacia absorbed by Pfizer of the US and Astra merged into AstraZeneca, based in the UK....
...Pfizer learned its lesson after its two other deals this decade, Warner-Lambert in 2000 and Pharmacia in 2003, gave it access to blockbusters but destroyed shareholder value (particularly the latter, which...
...Acquired when Pfizer bought Pharmacia in a takeover completed in 2000, Bextra, a painkiller in the same Cox-2 class as Merck’s Vioxx, was one of two drugs drawn to the attention of regulators and lawyers...
...Pfizer launched a $53bn takeover of Pharmacia in 2003 and Sanofi-Aventis was formed from a $64bn merger in 2004. But the megamerger strategy has failed to create value for shareholders....
...In 2004, Pfizer sold off a diagnostics business it had acquired as part of Pharmacia. Diagnostic groups may also be getting too expensive....
...But what really has made them different over the past decade is that Pfizer has led the drumbeat of consolidation in Big Pharma with its acquisition of Warner-Lambert and then Pharmacia for $60bn in 2003...
...In the case of Pharmacia and Upjohn noted above, all three were lacking; neither party could understand the other, and neither seems to have made much attempt to try....
...As Ian Read, president of worldwide pharmaceutical operations, put it in his presentation to analysts on Monday, the aim is to reduce the cost base with a “return to pre-Pharmacia headcount” – a reference...
...Pfizer, for example, found that deals with Warner-Lambert and Pharmacia at the start of the decade exacerbated as many problems as they solved, by adding more medicines about to come off-patent and a bigger...
...Critics’ of Pharmacia’s merger with Upjohn, where the Swedish-American group’s headquarters were moved to neutral London, have pointed to a similar risk....
...group Pharmacia in 2002. Farmers from Brazil to the US and Australia are increasingly looking for seeds that have been engineered to prevent crops succumbing to insect damage or disease....
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