Hoping to land on its feet after a tough year, Stada will soon be under new leadership. Investment firms Bain and Cinven announced their plans to select drug industry veteran Claudio Albrecht for the post, following more than a year of developments at the German company that were disappointing, dramatic and just plain strange.
After its €5.3 billion ($6.3 billion) buyout from Bain and Cinven fell short back in July, the drugmaker brought in former Boehringer Ingelheim executive Engelbert Coster Tjeenk Willink to serve as interim CEO. Bernhard Düttmann, a financial veteran, was named interim CFO. Bain and Cinven have since sweetened their offer and the companies are now working to win enough shareholder support to close the deal. They announced the Albrecht nomination on Friday.
Albrecht is a former CEO of two European generic firms, according to Bloomberg.
Stada’s dramatic year has featured the exit of longtime CEO Hartmut Retzlaff last June due to a “serious, long-term illness.” When his successor Mattias Wiedenfels took the helm, he quickly stripped Retzlaff’s son of some duties and fired company advisors.
The company has meanwhile dealt with with activist investor attention from Active Ownership Capital, which pushed to replace board members with its own candidates. After significant drama, the company nearly finished a deal to sell itself to Bain Capital and Cinven this year, but couldn’t win enough shareholder support.
As for the weird, Wiedenfels discovered he was the target of a spying operation as deal talks heated up, according to a report from Manager Magazin. According to that publication, the former helmsman found a recording device in his car and received photographs of himself in personal or private business situations.
By Eric Sagonowsky
Source: Fierce Pharma
The company plans to pour more than $500 million in additional funds into its active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) plant in Raheen, Limerick County, the country’s Industrial Development Agency (IDA) said. The new funding brings the company’s total investment in the site to 927 million euros ($1 billion).
“If in 2005 someone told you that two-thirds of our industry would be driven on the R&D side by emerging biopharma—it would be unthinkable. If one were to project that trend forward, what it would suggest is that we could have a day when we do this talk, say in 2027 or 2028, where 80% of the industry’s pipeline is coming from emerging companies.”
The German healthcare and agrochemicals giant told Reuters that in future its pharma pipeline will focus on cardiovascular disease, neurology, rare diseases and immunology, while de-emphasizing women’s health, a field it first focused on with the acquisition of the former women’s health specialist Schering in 2006.
