It is now a year since Pfizer, the UK pharmaceuticals giant, ducked out of renewing its bid for AstraZeneca. Investors are starting to wonder whether the company should have accepted the £55 a share on offer last spring, given the accelerating pace in M&A in the pharma sector since.
The answer is that it is too soon to say. AstraZeneca still faces the “patent cliff” over the next couple of years. Nexium, the heartburn treatment, and Crestor, for high cholesterol — which at one stage accounted for a third of all sales between them — will lose exclusivity. This has already happened for the former at the start of the year in the US, and one of the reasons why Astra beat consensus forecasts