AstraZeneca battling ‘headwinds’
pharmafile | February 7, 2014 | News story | Sales and Marketing | AstraZeneca, Soriot, farxiga, q4, results, xigduo
AstraZeneca is to shed another 550 jobs as its latest corporate restructure takes shape, bringing to 5,600 the number of redundancies expected between 2013 and 2016.
The news comes as the company revealed turnover (down 8% to $25.7 billion) and profit (falling 25% to $8.4 billion) both dropped last year, with chief executive Pascal Soriot, blaming “headwinds [which] will remain challenging” in the near term.
“As expected, our financial performance for 2013 reflects the ongoing impact from the loss of exclusivity for several key brands,” Soriot said.
Sales of Seroquel fell 39%, while cancer drug Arimidex dropped 30% and big-selling Crestor was also down 8%.
While AstraZeneca says Brilinta, the diabetes and respiratory franchises, plus emerging markets and Japan delivered an incremental $1.2 billion of revenue last year, patent expiries wiped out $2.2 billion of revenue.
But there were bright spots: Farxiga and Xigduo have been approved for type 2 diabetes and olaparib, its potential first-in-class oral poly ADP ribose polymerase (PARP) inhibitor for patients with BRCA mutated ovarian cancer, has been submitted for regulatory review.
And Soriot is confident that AstraZeneca can return to growth faster than anticipated, using the JP Morgan healthcare conference last month to pledge that it would halt the slide in its global sales in the next three years.
The company points to what it calls progress in ‘scientific leadership’, with a pipeline now containing 11 new Phase III molecules – almost twice as many as 2012.
This week AstraZeneca also completed its $4.3 billion acquisition of Bristol-Myers Squibb’s diabetes business, giving the company control over several big-name brands including Onglyza, Forxiga and Byetta in a core therapy area.
AstraZeneca announced last March that it was reorganising its global operations in a bid to improve R&D productivity, creating a new £330 million R&D centre and international HQ in Cambridge, UK, and adding to existing sites in the US and Sweden by 2016.
While the company anticipates it can create to $1.1 billion of annual benefits, it admits the cost of making it happen will be $700 million higher than first thought, pushing the restructuring bill up to $3.2 billion.
Adam Hill
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