Novartis is not a research and development company. The people in charge are not interested in developing products, not interestested in new innovative projects, not interested in investing the amount of money needed to carry a research project from initial phase at the lab bench, through process development and into clinical trials. They think it's possible to move something from research to market in 3 to 5 years, and if that doesn't happen, they can the project and lay people off. (Hello!! Clinical trials take many years to complete!!) Novartis would rather acquire companies that already have products in trials or on the market, strip what they want out of the acquired company, and dump what's left at some devalued price. This is vulture capitalism. Alcon is the latest victim. I guarantee most research projects at Alcon will stop, if they haven't already. Novartis will keep some minimal amount of research going at Alcon just for show. The main showpiece of research at Novartis is NIBR, which spends like crazy and produces very little.
Regarding Chiron, Novartis got it for practically nothing. The acquired the company for 7 billion and sold off the Betaseron business for the same amount. What Novartis got was a pharma group integrated into NIBR (this group has never produced a thing and was always supported by diagnostic profits), very excellent molecular biology technology for vaccines (and Novartis execs STILL don't know that...they simply do not know or do not care!), intellectual property that they let expire (Incredible incompetence!), a great German vaccines company (Behring), a sad Italian vaccines company, very excellent process developers and manufacturing experts that were laid off, and a diagnostics business that is still profitable but Novartis doesn't care.
But they are good vulture capitalists...that they are!!
Regarding Chiron, Novartis got it for practically nothing. The acquired the company for 7 billion and sold off the Betaseron business for the same amount. What Novartis got was a pharma group integrated into NIBR (this group has never produced a thing and was always supported by diagnostic profits), very excellent molecular biology technology for vaccines (and Novartis execs STILL don't know that...they simply do not know or do not care!), intellectual property that they let expire (Incredible incompetence!), a great German vaccines company (Behring), a sad Italian vaccines company, very excellent process developers and manufacturing experts that were laid off, and a diagnostics business that is still profitable but Novartis doesn't care.
But they are good vulture capitalists...that they are!!