Last week, Pfizer cashed in, selling its baby food business to Nestlé for $11.85 billion, and on Tuesday, the American pharmaceutical giant filed its first-quarter 2012 accounts, announcing its share buyback for $1.7 billion. dollars in the three months (with a goal of reaching five billion by the end of the year), signals from the decline in earnings from 2.22 billion dollars, equal to 28 cents a share, to 1.79 billion, and 24 cents In the period, turnover fell by 7% to 15.41 billion (below the consensus of 15.74 billion). The data was largely conditioned by the expiry of the patent on the anti-cholesterol Lipitor, from which Pfizer has obtained most of its fortune in recent years. In the quarter, in fact, the blockbuster (which in 2008 had guaranteed a turnover of 12.4 billion dollars, making it the best-selling branded drug in the world) saw its sales drop by 42% to 1.4 billion dollars , after the patent had expired in November, leaving the ground to the producers of generics (Pfizer had managed to postpone the coup a bit thanks to an agreement with the Indian Ranbaxy).
A quarterly therefore under the banner of Lipitor, negatively, which must necessarily be the starting point for the relaunch of Pfizer, which has already declared its intention to use the proceeds obtained from Nestlé not only to continue with the buyback but also "to other".
As the New York Times wrote yesterday, what was once the Big of big pharma, will now have to convince investors (who still support it: yesterday the stock traded moderately down, in line with Wall Street's performance) that it has a new strategy, which is not exclusively reductive, such as the officially announced 30% cut of the research budget to focus on more profitable businesses such as those of anticancer and Alzheimer's therapies.
In fact, Pfizer is thinking about downsizing. «It does not necessarily mean becoming smaller in absolute terms – explained the chief executive lan Read – given that the philosophy that underlies Pfizer does not change. We are a biopharmaceutical company focused on applying science to improve people's quality of life. And our core. That's what will determine our success." But Pfizer is in good company. In fact, this year alone, around twenty blockbuster drugs are out of patent. And, according to the calculations of Barclays,
