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...vintage Vasella: cool-headed, personable, direct--adjectives that frequently crop up in descriptions of the drug executive. Vasella is exceptionally smooth in dealing with advocates for lower pharmaceutical prices as well as with regulators and lawmakers, whether in his native Switzerland or in the U.S., where he is embarked on a major expansion. He is fluent in German, French and English and says he can muddle through in Italian and Spanish. More important, he is fluent in many cultures, from the elaborate rituals of Japanese business to an American culture that is at once informal and legalistic. Despite his modest...
Novartis, which operates in 140 countries, last year booked sales of $19 billion, up 10% from 2000. While such competitors as GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and Bristol-Myers Squibb are entering a period of declining revenue growth as patents on their major drugs expire, Novartis is poised for several years of steady double-digit expansion. This year its shares in the U.S. are up about 10%--the best performance among major drug companies--even as the Morgan Stanley Capital USA Health Care Index, a basket of big drug stocks, has fallen about 25%. Novartis is the 17th most valuable company...
Vasella knows, though, that he can't insulate Novartis from the rising public rebellion against drug prices. According to the advocacy group Families USA, prices of such branded drugs as Novartis' Miacalcin and AstraZeneca's Prilosec have grown at twice the rate of inflation, even as government controls have kept the same prescriptions much cheaper in most other countries. Patients in the U.S.--who account for roughly half the drug industry's annual global revenues of $364 billion--are howling, and they are getting heard in Congress. But so is Vasella, who employs 19,000 Americans and recently opened...
...modestly in stocks. Four years of psychoanalysis, Vasella says, helped free him "from the rules and obligations one imposes on oneself" and give him the courage to leap into a new career. In 1987 he sought the advice of Max Link, the well-connected and accessible head of the drug business for Swiss conglomerate Sandoz. Vasella was offered a job and sent to learn the ropes at the company's headquarters in East Hanover...
...trainee--but one with a rocket strapped to his back. A year after joining Sandoz, Vasella became product manager for a new drug named Sandostatin, approved to treat a rare pancreatic cancer. The head of Sandoz's U.S. pharmaceutical unit joked that Vasella could consider his job well done if he made Sandostatin a $5 million product, a pittance in the branded-drug business. Vasella realized that to make Sandostatin a commercial success, he had to find new uses for it. And he believed he could do that only by radically changing the game...