Pfizer will spend all that Covid cash. Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s chief executive officer, has repeatedly stressed that the company is mainly interested in the types of bolt-on acquisitions and deals that will bring in late-stage drugs and edgy earlier-stage technologies.
Naturally, that growing money pile prompts investors to wonder whether larger deals might be in the cards. On Tuesday’s earnings call, Bourla made clear that while Pfizer will be flexible in considering acquisitions, it will be most interested in areas where it has the scientific chops to create value, rather than synergy-driven deals.
Megamergers might have made financial sense earlier in the company’s history, he said. They typically require substantial cost-cutting to justify the premium paid in an acquisition, and in the past much of that activity has been driven not by success but by distress.
Notably, in the early 2000s, Pfizer made a series of huge deals as it scrambled to survive the loss of patents on its blockbuster cholesterol drug Lipitor.