Sanofi
Sanofi S.A. is a French multinational pharmaceutical and healthcare company headquartered in Paris. The corporation was established in 1973 and merged with Synthélabo in 1999 to form Sanofi-Synthélabo. In 2004, Sanofi-Synthélabo merged with Aventis and renamed to Sanofi-Aventis, which were each the product of several previous mergers. It changed its name back to Sanofi in May 2011. The company trades as "SAN" on Euronext Paris and "SNY" on Nasdaq in the United States, and is a component of the Euro Stoxx 50 stock market index. In 2023, the company’s seat in the Forbes Global 2000 was 89.
Sanofi engages in the research and development, manufacturing, and marketing of pharmacological products, principally in the prescription market, but the firm also develops over-the-counter medications. The corporation covers seven major therapeutic areas: cardiovascular, central nervous system, diabetes, internal medicine, oncology, thrombosis, and vaccines. It is the world's largest producer of vaccines through its subsidiary Sanofi Pasteur.
History
Sanofi-Synthélabo
Sanofi was founded on February 15, 1973 as a subsidiary of Elf Aquitaine, when Elf Aquitaine took control of the Labaz group, a pharmaceutical company formed in 1947 by Sociéte Belge de l'Azote et des Produits Chimiques du Marly; Labaz developed benziodarone in 1957. In 1993, Sanofi made a move into the Eastern Europe market by acquiring a controlling interest in Chinoin, a Hungarian drug company whose 1992, sales totaled about US$104 million. In the same year, Sanofi made its first significant venture into the US, and strengthened its presence in Eastern Europe, by first partnering with Sterling Winthrop and then acquiring the prescription pharmaceuticals business in 1994. Sanofi was incorporated under the laws of France in 1994, as a société anonyme, a form of limited liability company.Synthélabo was founded in 1970, through the merger of two French pharmaceutical laboratories, Laboratoires Dausse and Laboratoires Robert & Carrière. In 1973, the French cosmetics group L'Oréal acquired the majority of its share capital. In 1991, Synthelabo acquired Laboratories Delalande and Laboratoires Delagrange, and through this deal picked up the product metoclopramide.
Sanofi-Synthélabo was formed in 1999 when Sanofi merged with Synthélabo; at the time of the merger, Sanofi was the second largest pharmaceutical group in France in terms of sales and Synthélabo was the third largest. The merged company was based in Paris, France.
The merged companies focused on pharmaceuticals, divesting several businesses soon after the merger, including beauty, diagnostics, animal health and nutrition, custom chemicals, and two medical equipment businesses.
Aventis
Aventis was formed in 1999, when the French company Rhône-Poulenc S.A. merged with the German corporation Hoechst Marion Roussel, which itself was formed from the 1995 merger of Hoechst AG with Cassella, Roussel Uclaf, and Marion Merrell Dow. Hoechst AG, the majority partner at the time in Hoechst Marion Roussel, was itself a merger of two of the three forcibly separated subsidiaries of IG Farben, exploiter of Auschwitz slave labor and supplier of Zyklon B during The Holocaust. The merged company was based in Schiltigheim, near Strasbourg, France.At the time of the merger, Rhône-Poulenc's business included the pharmaceutical businesses Rorer, Centeon, and Pasteur Merieux, the plant and animal health businesses Rhône-Poulenc Agro, Rhône-Poulenc Animal Nutrition, and Merial, and a 67 percent share in Rhodia, a specialty chemicals company. Hoechst, one of the companies that resulted from the post-WWII split of IG Farben, had seven primary businesses: Hoechst Marion Roussel, AgrEvo, HR Vet, Dade Behring, Centeon, Celanese, and Messer. Merieux has been in the business of selling blood products, and in the 1980s, during the AIDS epidemic, Merieux and other companies were involved in scandals related to HIV-contaminated haemophilia blood products that were sold to developing nations.
In 2000, Aventis and Millennium Pharmaceuticals, a US biotechnology company formed to discover new drugs based on the then-new science of genomics, announced that Aventis would make a $250M investment in Millennium and would pay $200M to Millennium in research fees over five years, one of the largest such deals between a big pharmaceutical company and a biotech company at the time.
In late 2000, in the midst of the recall of Starlink, its genetically modified maize product, Aventis announced that it had determined to sell off Aventis Cropscience, the seed and pesticide business unit it had created from the agriculture businesses of its predecessors. In October 2001, Bayer and Aventis announced that Bayer would acquire the unit for about $6.6 billion; the unit became Bayer CropScience, making Bayer the world's second-largest agrochemical company behind Syngenta.
In 2003, Aventis entered into a collaboration with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, a New York biotechnology company, to develop Regeneron's VEGF-inhibiting drug, aflibercept, which was then in Phase I clinical trials. Aventis invested $45 million in Regeneron and made an upfront payment of $80 million in cash. Regeneron partnered the use of the drug with Bayer Healthcare in the field of proliferative eye diseases, and under the name Eylea it was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2011; after several setbacks in clinical trials, Regeneron and Sanofi got the drug approved for metastatic colorectal cancer in combination with other agents, under the brand name Zaltrap in 2012.
Sanofi-Aventis merger
Sanofi-Aventis was formed in 2004, when Sanofi-Synthélabo acquired Aventis. In early 2004, Sanofi-Synthélabo made a hostile takeover bid for Aventis worth €47.8 billion. Initially, Aventis rejected the bid because it felt that the bid offered inferior value based on the company's share value, and the board of Aventis went so far as to enact poison pill provisions and to invite Novartis to enter merger negotiations. The three-month takeover battle concluded when Sanofi-Synthélabo launched a friendly bid of €54.5 billion in place of the previously rejected hostile bid. The French government played a strong role, desiring what it called a "local solution", by putting heavy pressure on Sanofi-Synthélabo to raise its bid for Aventis and for Aventis to accept the offer and by rejecting Aventis's poison pill proposal. One of the largest risks in the deal for both sides was the fate of the patents protecting Clopidogrel, which was one of the top-selling drugs in the world at the time and the major source of Sanofi's revenue.Post-merger activities
In 2006, Iraqis infected with HIV sued Sanofi and Baxter over HIV-contaminated haemophilia blood products sold by Merieux in the 1980s. In 2006, the US patents on clopidogrel were challenged when a Canadian generics company, Apotex, filed an Abbreviated New Drug Application under the Hatch-Waxman Act, received FDA approval, and started marketing a generic formulation of clopidogrel. While Sanofi-Aventis and its partner in the drug, Bristol Myers Squibb, were able to get an injunction to stop Apotex from selling it, the case became complicated when settlement negotiations fell apart twice – the second time because of an oral agreement made by BMS CEO Peter Dolan that BMS failed to disclose to the Federal Trade Commission during the review of the settlement agreement to ensure that it did not violate antitrust law. When Apotex disclosed the oral agreement to the FTC, the FTC launched an investigation that led to Dolan's dismissal by BMS. Apotex finally lost on the patent litigation issues after its third appeal was decided in favor of BMS/Sanofi in November 2011; Apotex had to pay ~$442 million in damages and ~$108 million in interest for infringing the patent, which it paid in full by February 2012. Apotex also sued BMS and Sanofi for $3.4 billion for allegedly breaching the settlement agreement; Apotex lost a jury trial in March 2013.In 2007, Sanofi-Aventis expanded on Aventis's prior relationship with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals; in the new deal Sanofi-Aventis agreed to pay Regeneron $100 million per year for five years, under which Regeneron would use its monoclonal antibody discovery platform to create new biopharmaceuticals, to which Sanofi-Aventis gained the exclusive right to co-develop. In 2009, the companies expanded the deal to $160 million per year and extended it to 2017. , the collaboration had four antibodies in clinical development and had filed an IND for a fifth. Two were against undisclosed targets, one targeted the interleukin-6 receptor as a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, another targeted nerve growth factor for the treatment of pain, and another targeted delta-like ligand 4 as a cancer treatment.
Between 2008, when Chris Viehbacher was hired as CEO, and 2010, the company spent more than $17 billion in mergers and acquisitions to strengthen its consumer healthcare and generics platforms, especially in emerging markets, in the face of looming patent cliffs and the growth of the consumer healthcare segment. In September, Zentiva was acquired for €1.8 billion, expanding the group's presence in eastern European markets.
In 2009, Medley Farma, the third largest pharmaceutical company in Brazil and a leading generics company there, was acquired for about $635 million. Sanofi outbid Teva Pharmaceuticals. The deal was approved by Brazil's antitrust authorities in May 2010. Later that year, Indian vaccine manufacturer Shantha Biotechnics was acquired for $784 million. In October Sanofi-Aventis announced that it would lay off about 1700 US employees because of restructuring triggered by growing generic competition and other factors, and that the company would focus its US operations on diabetes, atrial fibrillation, and oncology.
In 2010, US consumer healthcare company Chattem, Inc. was acquired for around $1.9 billion. In the same year, Nepentes Pharma was acquired for $130 million and BMP Sunstone Corporation for $520.6 million.