Category: The Start of a Comeback for Pfizer’s Dividend?

JGrimes
Pfizer is raising its dividend, and the company plans to keep hiking payouts to shareholders in years to come (”barring significant unforeseen events,” of course).
Still, even barring those unforeseen events, it could be a while before the company gets back to the fat dividends it was paying before it spent $68 billion to […]

JGrimes
Here’s a quick roundup of some Pfizer news:
After cutting its famously fat dividend in connection with the Wyeth acquisition, Pfizer may be set for a dividend increase. In a note this morning, Credit Suisse analyst Catherine Arnold suggests the company is likely to make a decision by the middle of the month, and […]

JGrimes
Pfizer’s deal today with Israeli biotech Protalix BioTherapeutics to license most of the rights for a promising therapy for a rare disease caught our eye for a number of reasons:
The deal gives Pfizer rights to sell a treatment for Gaucher’s disease that will soon go for FDA approval. Pfizer will pay Protalix as […]

JGrimes
Two years from today, if everything goes according to plan, Lipitor will go generic. That’s likely to be the end of an era when big drug makers built their businesses around mega-blockbuster drugs that treat common, chronic conditions.
In its magazine section this weekend, the Financial Times traced the long arc of the cholesterol […]

JGrimes
In an interview with the Financial Times, J&J CEO Bill Weldon gets to gloat about running the mother of all diversified health companies at a moment when many big drug makers are looking to diversify.
He notes that the pendulum of opinion swings back and forth on the value of diversification: “For years we […]

JGrimes
Sure, dozens of groups are speaking at this week’s FDA meeting on online advertising for drugs and medical devices.
But we’re particularly interested in what Google had to say, given the company’s 800-pound-gorilla status in online advertising — as well as the flurry of FDA warning letters earlier this year regarding drug ads that […]

JGrimes
Johnson & Johnson has long had a habit of buying companies, then letting them continue to run at arm’s length from the home office. Lately, though, the company has taken a different tack: Partnering with other companies without buying them outright.
J&J CEO Bill Weldon explains the shift to the Financial Times:
“The cost of […]

JGrimes
Pfizer’s huge R&D shop is even bigger now that the company has swallowed Wyeth. To get a sense of the changes that could be in store, the Health Blog spoke today with the company’s two top R&D execs — Martin Mackay, a Pfizer veteran who will lead small-molecule work, and Mikael Dolsten, a […]

JGrimes
Pfizer is finally closing the door on a long-running legal battle in the Nigerian state of Kano. The case goes back to a 1996 study of Pfizer’s drug Trovan, conducted during a meningitis outbreak.
The company will underwrite $30 million in health-care initiatives in Kano, give the state $10 million for legal costs and […]

JGrimes
Here’s a post by our colleague Ashby Jones at WSJ’s Law Blog:
Well, that was strange. The first trial in what’s widely expected to be a long-running string of cases against Pfizer over the alleged effects of Pfizer’s anti-epilepsy drug Neurontin was dropped today by the plaintiff’s lawyer on the case, Mark Lanier.
The case, […]