What is Pfiz­er go­ing to buy next? Al­bert Bourla out­lines his M&A strat­e­gy in the post-Up­john era

In a call with an­a­lysts on Mon­day, CEO Al­bert Bourla put the spot­light on the big phar­ma’s shift to be­com­ing a “small­er, more fo­cused, sci­ence-based com­pa­ny with a sin­gu­lar fo­cus on in­no­v­a­tive phar­ma” now that Up­john has been dealt with and he has a con­sumer deal with GSK.

In the Bourla era, that means a steady flow of new deals, but noth­ing that tips the big phar­ma scale. 

That ap­proach has al­ready trig­gered deals for Ther­a­chon (small, with $340 mil­lion cash up­front) and Ar­ray (mid-sized at $11.4 bil­lion), and Bourla says the BD team con­tin­ues to scout for “bolt-on op­por­tu­ni­ties, that would be on ear­ly to mid-stage op­por­tu­ni­ties, where maybe there is high­er risk as you know, but the val­ue cre­ation is fur­ther greater. And the risk of op­er­a­tional dis­rup­tion is per­haps low­er.”

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