Pharma Strategy Blog

"When you do smaller to mid-sized deals, it is easier to search, complete a deal, and then hand it over to your line management and move on to the next deal.  It’s when you do a big deal that the whole company gets bogged down in deciding whose e-mail system you’re going to use or where headquarters are going to be."

Chris Viehbacher, sanofi-aventis

Source: Bloomberg

This afternoon I was catching up on the Pharma news after driving back from the ePharma conference in Philadelphia and racing the snowstorm home and the quote caught my eye.

Viehbacher is right. 

While sanofi-aventis (a client company) have been quietly focused on small to medium deals to offset the patent cliff and evaluating their pipeline, Pfizer and Merck have been more inwardly focused and seemingly bogged down in decisions at all levels of the organisation that inevitably descends on companies going through mega mergers.

Sometimes bigger isn't always better.