Replies to post #53617 on Biotech Values

[DewDiligence]

LOL—this blogger must be reading iHub.
What’s the likelihood that he would cite the
same 2001 BW article by coincidence?

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2007/10/18/former-blackstone-guy-will-run-novartiss-drug-unit/

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Former Blackstone Guy Will Run Novartis’ Drug Unit

October 18, 2007, 9:14 am
by Jacob Goldstein

The management shuffle at Novartis continued today, as the company put a private equity guy it hired a few months ago in charge of its prescription drug unit.

Joe Jimenez, who left Blackstone in April to run Novartis’s consumer healthcare division, will now be in charge of revamping the company’s prescription business, the WSJ reports. He’ll also oversee job cuts the company’s planning in the U.S. While he was at Blackstone, Jimenez spent five years on the board of AstraZeneca.

Thomas Ebeling, who had been in charge of prescription drugs, will take over the consumer healthcare division. As this 2001 BusinessWeek article pointed out, Ebeling was supposed to bring Novartis the marketing genius he’d honed at Pepsi [the blog has a hyperlink in the underlined text pointing to the article in #msg-23784999]. Now he’s changing jobs within the country just a few months after Novartis’s other marketing whiz Kurt Graves decamped for Vertex.

The company also said it will step up its efforts to get in on the biotech land grab by launching a unit called Novartis Biologics.

Novartis bucked drug industry trends last year, adding about 1,000 sales reps while other companies were cutting back. But the market bucked back, and Novartis said today that it’s cutting more than 1,000 U.S. sales rep jobs.

Some of the reps were hired to detail Galvus, a diabetes drug that the company thinks could be a blockbuster. But the FDA, citing safety concerns, has thus far refused to approve it, and Novartis doesn’t expect to re-apply for the go-ahead until 2009.

So the company is cutting 510 staff sales rep positions, and an equal number of third-party reps. Another 240 positions will be cut from “headquarters functions” related to Novartis’s U.S. operations. The company said that most of the cuts would come from “not filling vacant positions.”
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[DewDiligence]

Matt Herper’s article on NVS’ Joe Jimenez (formerly at Heinz) makes a nice bookend with the 2001 write-up in #msg-23784999 on Thomas Ebeling (formely at Pepsi); from Herper’s article:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2012/02/08/can-the-man-from-heinz-keep-novartis-on-top

When you ask around the drug industry who the best leader of the last two decades was, Daniel Vasella’s name always comes up. He built Basel-based Novartis from an also-ran into the most respected drug research laboratory in the pharmaceutical industry. His 14 years running the company are legendary, with a record of drug development successes unmatched by any other chief executive over the past decade. His string of hits included cancer treatments Gleevec, Zometa and Diovan, part of a stable of blockbusters that accounts for more than $16 billion a year in revenues and helps millions of patients a year fight illnesses like leukemia, diabetes and breast cancer.

So when he chose a successor in 2010, many were surprised that he picked the ketchup guy.