Big Pharma Has to Bet Big on M&A. Investors Don’t.
You’d be better off investing in an index fund.
AbbVie paid up for Allergan and its Botox drug. The deal may pay off, but the shares initially tumbled.
Photographer: Jason Alden/Bloomberg
AbbVie Inc.’s $63 billion purchase of Botox maker Allergan Inc. is the third super-sized drug deal announced in the past 14 months, and the second just this year after Bristol-Myers’s Squibb Co.’s even bigger $74 billion purchase of Celgene Corp. These huge combinations are no fluke: In the last decade, the biopharmaceutical industry has pursued more $40 billion-plus transactions than any other sector, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
These big deals happen for a reason. Drug development is difficult, unpredictable and time consuming; even when the billions pharmaceutical companies spend on R&D or strategic purchases and partnerships bear fruit with top-sellers, those blockbusters still face the prospect of expiring patents and an eventual decline in sales. That pressures drugmakers into bigger acquisitions, in spite of their mixed track record and inherently risky and complicated nature. In AbbVie's case, the company needs to find a replacement for its $19 billion-a-year arthritis drug Humira, while Bristol-Myers is too dependent on two key drugs.