If you applied your own logic to Elite shares you would have refused to buy at 3 cents because it had had a large loss in the previous years. Its a silly argument to make and won't convince anyone to vote the way you want. The people who will vote no to avoid a merger are the smaller shareholders who want an immediate cash out. People with a large holding of Elite in a Roth could prefer Pfizer shares over cash because they can keep some of their investment in the Roth in Pfizer shares to continue to grow over many years. All tax free! Why would they want to keep it in Pfizer for a while? Because it is a great deal right now and will likely grow in the next few year. It pays a nice dividend. Some investors here could pull a couple million out of their roth and let the rest ride pulling in a dividend while still having the opportunity to grow another 10 to 50% (as your pointed out!).
Getting shares of a profitable, healthy company when its shares have a depressed price without good reason is a gift. It means you get more bang for each of the your shares in a buyout. Pfizer is not a company that is going to go out of business anytime soon. Its at a 5 year low with new products coming up soon. An investor should not want shares of a company that has had a giant increase in the past year, because it is very very rare that the market supports year over year large returns.
Pfizer has multiple new growth drivers in its lineup. They include migraine therapy Nurtec ODT (gained through its 2022 acquisition of Biohaven) and cancer drug Padcev (picked up via Pfizer's 2023 buyout of Seagen). Pfizer has also invested heavily in research and development. Those efforts are paying off with new products such as multiple myeloma drug Elrexfio and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine Abrysvo. We can't talk about Pfizer without mentioning its dividend: At the current share price, its forward yield is 6.58%. With such a juicy dividend, Pfizer won't have to deliver much share price growth to provide attractive total returns for investors.
Overall, PFE ranks 2nd on our list of the best affordable stocks to buy according to hedge funds.