Sanofi Said to Consider Smith & Nephew, Takeda Executives as CEO
Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) — Sanofi has considered Olivier Bohuon of medical-device maker Smith & Nephew Plc and Takeda Pharmaceutical Co.’s Christophe Weber as possible replacements for ousted Chief Executive Officer Chris Viehbacher, said people familiar with the situation.
The board of Paris-based Sanofi has started contacting potential candidates and wants to move quickly with the recruiting, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private matters. Eric Cornut, Novartis AG’s chief ethics officer, also is a potential candidate, as is Olivier Brandicourt, head of Bayer AG’s health-care business, some of the people said.
The names cited in the search indicate Sanofi is focusing mostly on French executives with pharmaceutical experience. The company last month ousted Viehbacher, a Canadian-German, saying relations between him and the board weren’t close enough and that he failed to sufficiently execute the strategy. Some investors said there was a culture clash between Viehbacher and the board, which is mostly French. Chairman Serge Weinberg said nationality wouldn’t be a criteria in the search.
“You’ve got to have somebody who is agile enough to deal with resource allocation on the one hand, but also has the ability to catch on to changes,” Michael Leuchten, an analyst at Barclays Plc in London, said by phone. “This is where people are a little bit concerned now, because people thought Viehbacher had that.”
Bohuon, Weber
Bohuon previously worked at drugmakers Pierre Fabre SA, Abbott Laboratories and GlaxoSmithKline Plc. He declined to comment on the Sanofi job when asked about it on a conference call last month.
Weber, another former Glaxo executive, joined Osaka, Japan- based Takeda as chief operating officer in April and the company plans to have him become CEO next year. He’s unlikely to accept a Sanofi offer after such a short time at Takeda, three people said.
Bohuon, Weber and Brandicourt are French. Cornut, who is Swiss, ran Novartis’s French operations. The board may be considering other candidates and could still turn to someone else, one person said.
AstraZeneca Plc CEO Pascal Soriot also remains a possible candidate, although he has already been approached and said he wasn’t interested, the people said. Soriot, who is French, is unlikely to leave his current job for the Sanofi one, they said. Asked about the job on a Nov. 6 conference call, Soriot said he couldn’t say whether he was interested.
Cambridge Meeting
The search is under way as Weinberg, who’s serving as interim CEO, prepares to brief investors tomorrow in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Sanofi’s new medicines, including the insulin Toujeo and the cholesterol treatment alirocumab.
Weinberg has been busy meeting with employees and others since becoming interim CEO, two people familiar with his role said. Within an hour of Viehbacher’s ouster he started calling members of the executive team to reassure them of the company’s strategy, one of them said.
The week of Nov. 3 he visited company offices in Cambridge and New Jersey to meet employees, three people said. He also spoke by phone and then met in person with Len Schleifer, the CEO of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc., Sanofi’s partner on alirocumab and other treatments, according to one person.
Ben Atwell, a spokesman for London-based Smith & Nephew, Jocelyn Gerst, a Takeda spokeswoman in Deerfield, Illinois, Eric Althoff at Basel, Switzerland-based Novartis, Jack Cox at Sanofi and Christian Hartel, a spokesman for Leverkusen, Germany-based Bayer, declined to comment.
–With assistance from Makiko Kitamura in London, Simeon Bennett in Geneva and Jacqueline Simmons in Paris.
To contact the reporter on this story: Albertina Torsoli in Geneva at atorsoli@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Phil Serafino at pserafino@bloomberg.net Andrew Pollack
