Global Pharma Company Beats the Competition to a Strategic Acquisition

Posted by | Fuld & Company

Background & Challenge

The top leadership of a leading global pharmaceutical company decided to enter an extremely fast-moving but potentially lucrative therapeutic area in infectious diseases.

Approach

We concluded that the client’s best strategy was to acquire promising IP from outside the company, and we identified the most promising targets, three early stage companies. The client partnered with one of these companies, beat out a host of other suitors for it, and began collaboration on a novel approach to the infectious disease. The competition in this disease area, populated by millions of patients worldwide, had been heating up for several years, with competitors snapping up promising startups. Our client’s leaders, who did not want to be left behind, put their full weight behind the effort to join the race.

Fuld & Company’s Life Science Consulting practice intensely monitored the market, which featured many competitors, rapid scientific breakthroughs, numerous early stage companies, and a handful of leading companies racing toward the ultimate prize.

The client needed help understanding how to regain its momentum as well as to improve its response to rapidly changing market conditions. It needed to know which strategic steps made the most sense and how much of a change and likely investment this effort required.

Researching each product group, we organized a war gaming series to stress-test the strategy for each product group. By testing the strategic assumptions of the client and the rival companies across the entire portfolio, we helped surface global strategies among the rivals that were at times lost when looking at a single group alone. Over a six-month period, we analyzed the output of each war game and rolled up the entire set of recommendations into a rationalized set of recommendations, which included everything from acquisition to introduction of new technology and service initiatives.

Result & Benefits

The war games uncovered a series of strategic gaps with the most glaring of them related to a variety of customer services. Fundamentally an engineering-driven firm, it had thought of service in the past as machinery repair. The strategy sessions uncovered an entirely different type of service gap, that of servicing the customer, which included training and better informatics demanded of the machines themselves.

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Tags: BioPharma, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Mergers & Acquisition, Pharmaceuticals