February 19, 2015
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Sr. Editor
As the whole world of biotech holds its breath waiting for French drugmaker Sanofi to name its new CEO, market watchers are already analyzing the resume of the rumored frontrunner for the job, Olivier Brandicourt, the current head of Bayer AG ‘s healthcare business.
Brandicourt, 59, originally started out as a researcher of tropical and infectious diseases, but has climbed his way up the corporate ladder, eventually finding himself at Pfizer Inc. .
There he focused on diabetes drug Lipitor, helping the company transition it after it came off patent--a situation he may face again at Sanofi, when its insulin pen Lantus, which accounts for over 30 percent of Sanofi‘s profits, loses its patent later this year.
But above all, the fact that Brandicourt is French will be the largest incentive for the famously Francophonic Sanofi, said analysts.
“He has the necessary criteria to do this job. First of all, he is French and therefore well-connected in France and second, he knows the American market, which is important for a large pharmaceutical company,” Norbert Janisch, fund manager with Raiffeisen Capital Management in Vienna, told Reuters.
Reuters also speculated that because of his infectious background, which took him to West and Central Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo as a doctor with the Paris Institute of Infectious and Tropical Diseases, Brandicourt will be a good shepherd for Sanofi’s emerging markets portfolio, which comprises a third of its revenue. Brandicourt’s focus at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital was malaria research, and Sanofi hopes to launch a vaccine for malaria’s cousin, dengue fever, later this year.
All week, Wall Street has waited, after news broke Monday that Sanofi would name Brandicourt the company’s new CEO sometime before tomorrow.
Last Friday, Bloomberg cited same sources as saying that Brandicourt is currently “unwinding contractual obligations” at the German company.
Brandicourt has long been among the list of possible choices, Sanofi said last Thursday that it will name a new chief executive in mere weeks, as it attempted to put to rest rumors that the company could not find any executives willing to take the reins after it unceremoniously ousted its previous CEO last fall.
“The announcement will be before the end of the first quarter,” Chairman Serge Weinberg, who has been acting CEO since Chris Viehbacher was fired in October, told Reuters in Paris today.
Weinberg also said that when the company announces financial results at the end of the first quarter, Sanofi is projecting a 1.5 percent quarterly earnings per share growth and is betting that a weak euro could help push up its profits.
Sanofi has endured protracted heckling from market watchers, who have watched with bemusement as more than three potential candidates have turned down the top job at the company, after the board ousted former popular Viehbacher in a power struggle over strategy.
Indeed, Wall Street is already speculating that Sanofi‘s Chairman Serge Weinberg may have to publicly acknowledge in his earnings results next week that the company has met with unparalleled difficulty of tempting someone into their head job.
Weinberg has previously declined to comment on rumors that Smith & Nephew Inc. French chief Olivier Bohuon, Christophe Weber, the French chief operating officer of Takeda Pharmaceuticals , and AstraZeneca PLC ‘s Pascal Soriothad turned down the CEO job at Sanofi.
“We have no comment on the subject,” Weinberg said, because he was only speaking “in general” about the difficulty of finding top talent for the position.
A source told Reuters that in the meantime, Sanofi continues to miss out.
“I think it is going to take time,” said a source close to the company told the news service Friday. “What we risk missing in the meantime is a strategic vision that you cannot have without a deep knowledge of the pharmaceuticals sector.”
In the past, Weinberg has complained that the high tax burden imposed upon companies by the French government is hindering Sanofi’s search for a new chief executive.
“The deterioration of French tax-competitiveness and the burden on companies and individuals pose a problem,” Weinberg told reporters in Paris.
“It’s extremely difficult to attract international executives or even bring back French ones who have left. There will be consequences if this continues, because we can’t rely on patriotic sentiment or goodwill alone.”
The situation is likely an ironic one for Weinberg, who was instrumental in ousting Sanofi’s last CEO, Christian Viehbacher, only to find that candidates for the position seem to be thin on the ground. In the interim, Weinberg must fill the role himself, in addition to his duties as chairman.
“The trouble with finding a successor hinges on the fact that we don’t know the real reason he was fired, and because a lot of people are asking themselves questions about the subject,” said an industry insider who has spoken to some potential candidates.
“The very low pay-off he received only reinforces the idea that the reasons he was fired are not the ones that have been talked about.”
Sanofi’s board of directors fired Viehbacher on Oct. 29 because of “strategic differences,” including Viehbacher’s plan to sell the company’s portfolio of mature drugs worth about $7.9 billion.
Although Viehbacher was popular with shareholders because he managed to double the firm’s stock price during his tenure, management had long been at odds with him, particularly because he was the first non-French Sanofi chief executive. When he moved his family to Boston last year, spending only about a third of his time in France, the board acted to remove him.
BioSpace Temperature Poll
Will Job Cuts Continue? After a week that saw Quintiles, Sanofi and Actavis slashing almost a 1,000 biotech jobs, BioSpace wonders if the ax will continue to fall. Give us your thoughts about the sector’s “streamlining” below.
