Company Overview
Highlights
Responsible for Bob Dole’s favorite pharmaceutical, Viagra.
Spends more money every year on research and development (more than $7 billion a year) than any of its Big Pharma peers.
Pfizer’s recruiting operations are highly regarded in the field of HR. It also regularly wins kudos as an employee-friendly company.
Pfizer, the company that gave us Viagra and Lipitor, remains a pharmaceutical powerhouse. But it has fallen from the lofty heights that it reached in the early 2000s after releasing a string of blockbuster drugs and making major acquisitions. The company’s revenues increased 1 percent, although largely because of favorable foreign exchange rates. The decline has come as the company’s patents for several blockbuster drugs have expired, most notably for Norvasc and Zoloft. Last year, revenues for those two products alone fell a whopping $3.4 billion. Norvasc is a treatment for high blood pressure. Zoloft is an anti-depressant.
The company replaced its long-time CEO Hank McKinnell in 2006 with chief legal counsel, Jeffrey Kindler. Kindler has been working to streamline operations and reduce costs. In 2006 and 2007, Pfizer laid off a total of more than 10,000 employees and closed three research and three manufacturing facilities. The company has been looking to assign more of its manufacturing to outside contractors. Pfizer has been collaborating more with competitors to develop future blockbusters. The development of high revenue-producing drugs to replace drugs whose patents have expired is a problem throughout the pharmaceutical industry. Indeed, Pfizer is trying to extend its patent for the cholesterol drug Lipitor, which generated nearly $13 billion in sales in 2007.
Still, Pfizer is optimistic about its future. The company has about 200 drugs in development. It spent $7.5 billion on R&D. In 2007, five Pfizer drugs apiece surpassed $1 billion in revenue. Pfizer has high hopes for AIDS drug Selzentry, Chantix, which is supposed to help smokers quit smoking and cancer medicine Sutent.
Pfizer has been aggressive in acquiring companies with strong products or the potential to help the company improve its own pipeline. In 2008, it purchased Encysive Pharmaceuticals for $195 million. Encysive has a hypertension drug that is already marketed in several European countries. Last year, Pfizer acquired the agricultural biotech company Embrex.