Rivaroxaban

Dive Brief:Bayer CEO Bill Anderson is asking investors to bear with the German conglomerate through one more challenging year before a turnaround effort starts showing significant results.The company on Wednesday reported a net loss of 2.55 billion euros, or 2.60 euros a share, in 2024 on sales of 46.6 billion euros, or about $50 billion. Currency exchange rates hurt the companys results, Bayer said. In 2023, Bayer reported a net loss of 2.94 billion euros, or 2.99 euros a share, on revenue of 47.6 billion euros.Next year will be difficult in terms of financial performance, with sales little changed from 2024 and earnings and cash flow falling behind the previous year, Anderson said in prepared remarks. We see an improved trajectory starting in 2026.Dive Insight:Bayer has been around since 1863, growing from a two-man partnership focused on making dyes to one of the largest players in pharmaceuticals, consumer health and crop science. But the companys shares have been in steady decline for almost eight years amid sluggish financial results.Anderson became CEO in 2023 promising a radical realignment of Bayers internal culture that would shed layers of bureaucracy and make the company more nimble and profitable. In the latest earnings announcement, he said the company would be adding profitability at the crop science division to its list of focus areas along with a five-year plan to improve earnings.The outlook boosted Bayers American depositary receipts, which rose more than 6%, to $6.60 apiece,in early trading Wednesday. They have gradually been recovering from a sharp drop in November, when Bayer lowered 2025 earnings guidance. The ADRs traded above $33 in October 2017.Anderson has so far resisted calls to shed any of the companys main business units, as rivals such as Merck & Co., Johnson & Johnson and Novartishave done. We have three great businesses, with attractive long-term prospects, Anderson said Wednesday. We expect them to compete at the forefront of their fields. Whenever thats not the case, were going to take action.In pharmaceuticals, Bayer is fighting through the expiration of patent protection for Xarelto, but Anderson said the company is rejuvenating its pipeline and expects to soon reap the rewards of that effort. Growth in the unit should return in 2027, with margins starting to expand in 2028, Anderson said.Growth will be led by the companys Nubeqa prostate cancer drug and Kerendia kidney disease treatment, which together should bring in sales of more than 2.5 billion euros in 2025, Anderson said.The company is also planning to launch two drugs it sees as future top sellers. In April, Bayer expects to start booking European sales of the heart medicine Beyonttrawhich, according to development partner BridgeBio Pharma, has caught on quickly with U.S. doctors.The company also hoping to start selling a menopause drug called elinzanetant in the U.S. later this year. '

Something changed for Bill Anderson when he turned 50. He was ascending the ranks of Roche’s Genentech, but the Texas native felt like he was stuck in the same loop year after year. The company would conduct employee surveys that would bring back tepid results, spurring management to vow to improve work processes. It would roll out initiatives with names like “Bureaucracy Buster,” Anderson said, and then the cycle would repeat the following year. Anderson compared the experience to “Groundhog Day,” the 1993 comedy in which Bill Murray’s character relives the same day, over and over. “After 20 years of that, I turned 50 and I literally said, ‘I’m not going to keep doing this,’” Anderson said. “There’s either got to be a better way, or I’m going to do something else. I’ll go do a startup. I’ll go teach. I’m not going to just turn the corporate crank anymore.” Now 58, Anderson finds himself in a different world today. He left Roche in 2023 to take one of the most difficult jobs in the corporate world — leading Bayer, the German conglomerate with mountains of debt and massive lawsuits stemming from its 2018 acquisition of Monsanto. The pharma business relied on aging blockbusters like Xarelto and Eylea, and its pipeline was thin. The stock price was grim, falling over 80% over the past decade and down 59% since Anderson started. Fellow countrymates BioNTech and Merck KGaA are both now more valuable than Bayer, a storied German brand. The silver lining of all that tumult is the chance to try something new. Long frustrated by bureaucracy, Anderson now gets the chance to break the cycle and develop a new way of running a large drugmaker. While there are signs of promise, a long road lies ahead for Bayer’s turnaround. Anderson’s two-year anniversary as CEO is in June. And next week, when Bayer shares its fourth-quarter earnings results, it will provide the latest look into how Anderson’s plan is going and if investors buy that he can save Bayer. On the tail end of a 17-stop, monthslong road trip, Anderson sat down with Endpoints News this month in midtown Manhattan. Sipping a mint tea in a black blazer over a patterned T-shirt, he speaks with the slightest hint of southern twang from growing up in Lake Jackson, TX, offset by decades of globetrotting. He is a straight shooter in assessing Bayer. A year ago, he likened the company to his own gruesome leg injury. He fell off a skateboard one Sunday morning in June 2021, shattering his right femur in four places. That was basically Bayer, he told investors and Wall Street analysts in March 2024. “We’re a high-impact, mission-driven company with three great businesses,” Anderson said, referring to its pharma, consumer health, and agriculture units. “But we’re also badly broken in four places.” Bayer’s “four breaks” were lapsing patents on key drugs without a sufficient pipeline, high debt, litigation fallout, and a bureaucracy preventing people from doing their best work, Anderson said. For his broken femur, Anderson spent 11 nights recovering in the hospital and a year in physical therapy. A year after making those comments, Anderson said Bayer has made “good progress,” though it’s still in the earlier stages of the turnaround. The pipeline is being replenished, fueled by five positive Phase 3 readouts in 2024 for key drugs like the chronic kidney disease therapy Kerendia , the prostate cancer treatment Nubeqa , and an experimental compound for menopause called elinzanetant . There were no negative Phase 3 readouts in 2024, Anderson added. The debt is being paid down, and Anderson is dedicating much of his time to trying to contain the legal liabilities. Bayer has already paid over $10 billion to settle tens of thousands of lawsuits claiming the Roundup weedkiller causes cancer, but tens of thousands of suits are still pending. “If we don’t fix that, we don’t have a future,” Anderson said. Since Anderson’s Groundhog Day moment eight years ago, he has formed his own philosophy for running a large company. It’s called Dynamic Shared Ownership. That sounds a lot like corporate jargon, but Anderson insists it’s fundamentally different. In a nutshell, DSO eliminates layers of management and leaves smaller teams with more decision-making power. These teams set their own measurable goals for 90-day cycles and can borrow talent from other teams. He found inspiration outside the drug industry. One of his favorite examples is Buurtzorg Nederland, a Dutch home-care organization founded by nurses in 2006. Buurtzorg now has over 16,000 employees with an administrative office of less than 100 workers and only two directors. It relies on small, self-managed teams of nurses to make most decisions. “I don’t really believe in the concept of the professional manager,” Anderson said. “We got to get the whole organization into a lean, mean fighting machine instead of an old corporate bureaucracy.” The DSO rollout is nowhere near as dramatic an idea as Buurtzorg, but it is reshaping Bayer. The US pharma unit, for instance, has reduced the number of managers by 40% under the new system, according to the company. Bayer has reduced its workforce by about 5,500 full-time employees in the first nine months of 2024. And, symbolically, Anderson replaced a 1,362-page rule book with a 14-page code of conduct. The moves are not without challenge, heightened by Anderson’s status of coming into Bayer as its first American CEO and pushing for radical change. German labor laws of codetermination, which give a legal right to employees to participate in company decisions, mean he must align with powerful works councils that represent employees. Brent Massmann left his role as a key expert within Bayer’s crop sciences unit last month, taking to LinkedIn to share his own DSO observations. Some managers have been “greatly impeded by dilution and dispersion of decision authority and by proliferation of non-value work,” he wrote. He also saw “valueless efforts to package work into” 90-day work cycles. It remains to be seen if this is moving the needle for investors. Berenberg analyst Sebastian Bray described two things that he thinks could spur a stock rally: reversing years of declining earnings per share, or landing decisive legal wins. “Neither occurrence seems imminent,” he wrote to investors in November, a statement that has held true since then. The balance sheet offers a sobering assessment of Bayer’s future. The company remains in the penalty box for investors with its debt, lawsuits and low earnings. Net sales fell by about 6% in 2023 from the previous year, and Wall Street forecasts another year-over-year decline to end 2024. Xarelto, Bayer’s best-selling medicine, is seeing accelerating declines in year-over-year sales, even before key patents expire in 2026. Anderson is transparent about these challenges, and he acknowledges that even DSO on its own cannot fix Bayer. “I wish it was that simple,” he said. Bayer’s pharma future needs to find replacements for Eylea and Xarelto. Anderson’s philosophy is simple: Great drugs lead the way, not existing franchises. He has seen that play out at Biogen with multiple sclerosis drugs, and at Roche and Genentech with Hemlibra in hemophilia or Ocrevus and Evrysdi in neuroscience. “A great molecule trumps everything,” he said. “The molecule makes the franchise, not the other way around.” Nubeqa may be that molecule. First approved in the US in 2019, the prostate cancer drug has surpassed €1 billion in sales through the first nine months of 2024, up 77% from the same period a year ago. It is the most important growth driver of Bayer’s pharma business. That success, Anderson said, can be attributed to DSO. Nicole Dinello, a pharma commercial veteran with over 30 years in the industry, arrived at Bayer just before Anderson did. She helped launch Nubeqa and shared numerous examples of how DSO changed how she and her team work. On their own, the changes aren’t earth-shattering. They removed two layers of management above her. Her team started making faster decisions. When someone asked what the team is doing for Spanish speakers in the US, they decided in the same meeting to translate a TV ad into Spanish and create a website and patient materials in Spanish. In a different instance, Dinello brought in a marketer from the cardiovascular business who helped craft Nubeqa’s social media strategy, working a few hours a week on that project. Each example adds into a better-functioning business. “It would never have occurred to me to go to the cardiovascular team and poach their talent,” Dinello said. “DSO feels different.” Anderson is no longer living through another Groundhog Day. But will his best efforts and new work philosophy be enough to save Bayer?