How oncology, vaccines and OTC will look after pharma’s game of musical chairs

The unusual switcheroo pulled by GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis today will cause enormous changes to the landscape in the key areas of oncology and vaccines, as well as in the consumer health sector (Glaxo-Novartis deals show swaps not mergers are the new normal, April 22, 2014).

A look at EvaluatePharma’s data on company rankings gives an insight into the rationale for these moves. Novartis will forestall a predicted drop from second place in the oncology rankings last year to fourth place in 2018, and GlaxoSmithKline, currently the world leader in vaccine sales, could retain the crown it is forecast to lose to Sanofi, principally through the addition of Novartis’s newly approved meningitis vaccine Bexsero (see tables).

At $14.5bn and $5.25bn respectively, Novartis’s purchase of GlaxoSmithKline’s marketed cancer assets and the transfer of most of Novartis’s vaccine business in the opposite direction are nowhere near as big as the rumoured Pfizer-AstraZeneca tie-up or the deal that Valeant is trying to force onto Allergan (Pfizer has done it before, but an AstraZeneca bid would be a big surprise, April 22, 2014). The swap is noteworthy, though, in that this sort of arrangement is a new tactic in big pharma – and it is also important considering the seismic effects the move will have on the oncology and vaccine sectors.

On the oncology side the addition of Glaxo’s future blockbuster Votrient, among others, adds a predicted $3.5bn to Novartis’s 2018 cancer drug sales. This ought to enable it to leapfrog Bristol-Myers Squibb to take the third place ranking among oncology companies.

It may even find itself within spitting distance of second-placed Celgene. It will get no further; even though Roche’s share of the worldwide oncology market is forecast to shrink marginally in the coming years, its lead remains unassailable.

The situation is reversed in the vaccines field, with Glaxo acquiring most of Novartis’s vaccines business, which is set to rake in $2bn in 2018. However, the deal does not include flu vaccines, meaning that Novartis will keep assets including Celtura, Fluvirin and Flucelvax, which are expected to sell $367m, $359m and $153m respectively in 2018.

Barring any other acquisitions on this sort of scale, the UK company could elbow Sanofi out of the way to reach the top of the vaccines tree in 2018. In any case, it is sure to climb higher than the third place analysts currently expect it to hold. The vaccine arena is already very consolidated into the top four players - Sanofi Pasteur MSD, the joint venture between Sanofi and Merck in Europe, means these two companies effectively hold a tighter grip on the space than this table suggests.

Novartis at number was five was clearly sub scale in this space. Just behind these companies sits Johnson & Johnson, which bought Crucell a few years ago to boost its vaccines know-how, but remains a very small player. Considering that the top four players now control more than 80% of the market, anti-trust concerns are likely to prevent any further substantial consolidation.

The deal in the consumer health space is different again, with the two companies forming a joint venture in a similar manner to the Viiv initiative Glaxo formed with Pfizer in 2009, into which it poured its HIV programmes.

This new company, 63.5% controlled by Glaxo, will become the second largest consumer health venture by 2018 sales, the data show. The baby powder-fuelled behemoth that is Johnson & Johnson’s consumer unit will remain out in front with nearly $16bn in 2018 sales, compared with around $13.5bn for the newly-created GlaxoVartis or whatever it may be named. 

Glaxo has been going through a shake up of its consumer unit - it sold Lucozade and Ribena to Suntory for $2.1bn - but it has long rejected calls to sell the whole division, pointing to its rich cash generation. The deal with Novartis shows that scale remains important in this business, particularly in fast-growing, emerging markets.

The various Novartis-Glaxo deals are not enormous in terms of dollar value, but they will exert meaningful influence on the three sectors they affect. These deals are unusual, but with megamergers apparently off the table, they may in future years come to be less of an oddity. It is not inconceivable that these sectors will undergo similar ructions before too long. 

To contact the writer of this story email Elizabeth Cairns in London at [email protected] or follow @LizEPVantage on Twitter