Ian Read taps his care­ful­ly groomed suc­ces­sor Al­bert Bourla as the next Pfiz­er CEO. What's his fu­ture look like?

Al­bert Bourla spent 25 years get­ting to the top at Pfiz­er, and now he’ll com­plete the last stride in­to the CEO’s of­fice, tak­ing con­trol of one of the world’s biggest phar­ma gi­ants.

Pfiz­er an­nounced this morn­ing that Bourla would be tak­ing the reins at the com­pa­ny on Jan­u­ary 1, with Ian Read mov­ing from chair­man and CEO to ex­ec­u­tive chair­man.

The big move was wide­ly her­ald­ed late last year, when Bourla was tapped to move from the com­pa­ny’s In­no­v­a­tive Health group to the new po­si­tion of chief op­er­at­ing of­fi­cer. That pro­mo­tion gave Bourla tremen­dous in­flu­ence in shap­ing a late-stage de­vel­op­ment pipeline which has be­gun to pay suf­fi­cient div­i­dends for Read to de-em­pha­size M&A, a long-fa­vored strat­e­gy at the com­pa­ny.

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