crash2006 Posted October 24, 2007 Report Share Posted October 24, 2007 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/e1b0135e-823c-11dc...2Fhome%2Feurope Quote Link to post Share on other sites
crashmonitor Posted October 24, 2007 Report Share Posted October 24, 2007 (edited) What a pig of an investment Glaxo has been.Now around £12 a share and been that way for the whole of this decade.And this was the must have pharma. share to have in your portfolio. Can this runt ever turn things around? Edited October 24, 2007 by crashmonitor Quote Link to post Share on other sites
KentishBear Posted October 24, 2007 Report Share Posted October 24, 2007 All the big pharma's are suffering at the moment (I work for one!). The basic problem is that drugs are getting harder to develop because all the low hanging fruit has gone, and the regulatory and commercial environments are getting tougher and tougher. If you do eventually develop something decent, you then have to make as much money as you can in the few years before your patent runs out and someone else starts undercutting you by flogging it at cost of manufacture. In addition to this the big medical insurance and state health systems have less money to spend and so take more convincing to buy your new wonder drug vs the one they've been using for the last 30 years. Fundamentally we in the west have most of the medicine we need. If you want to combat the epidemic of diabetes and obesity then the most cost effective way of doing it is through simple preventative measures, not giving fat people drugs. I'm sure that it's only a matter of time before governments wake up to this simple fact. Cancer is such a heterogenous disease that I'm not convinced we're going to be able to find anything that's widely useful beyond the crude 'kill all the fast growing cells' drugs we have at the moment, and if it's not widely applicable then our economies of scale don't work. The big white hope at the moment is biologicals - ie hormones, antibodies and so on. These will help (in theory) by making more biological mechanisms amenable to modulation than is possible by small molecule approaches. But in all honesty we don't really know quite how it'll work out, as the company who exploded some poor guy's head during a clinical trial a couple of years ago found out. Someone once said: Drug discovery isn't rocket science, it's much harder than that. Very true, and in my view it's becoming too difficult and thus too expensive to be economic and the days of big pharma are nearing their end. It seems mad these days that in the 50's drugs were discovered by slapping a bit of dulux on a rabbit and seeing if anything happened. It's so incredibly sophisticated now yet we hardly ever find anything!! I'm certainly not holding onto any of my shares any longer than I have to, and I'm not counting on having a job in the next 3-5 years either. Even if my job doesn't disappear entirely, then pharma like many other industries is moving what it has left to China and Asia where the wages are lower. My aim is to pay off the mortgage whilst I have the chance of a decent paying job, then move back to academia (assuming we have any universities left by then). Quote Link to post Share on other sites
aussieboy Posted October 24, 2007 Report Share Posted October 24, 2007 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/e1b0135e-823c-11dc...2Fhome%2Feurope If they stopped Goldman Sachs' retainer they'd save a few million. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Grime- skint wouldbe ftb Posted October 24, 2007 Report Share Posted October 24, 2007 Once the crash / recession kicks in big time, they'll be shifting bucket loads of Seroxat again, its what made their fortune at the turn of the century, it'll work again no doubt. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
VacantPossession Posted October 24, 2007 Report Share Posted October 24, 2007 All the big pharma's are suffering at the moment ( While I reach for my violin, I assume this statement is made in relative terms. While they might be "struggling" now, this is of course against the historical enormous profits in US and UK pharmaceuticals for decades until quite recently, but currently Asian and particularly Chinese pharmaceutical profits are exponentially up...maybe there is a connection. VP Quote Link to post Share on other sites
crashmonitor Posted October 25, 2007 Report Share Posted October 25, 2007 Fundamentally we in the west have most of the medicine we need. If you want to combat the epidemic of diabetes and obesity then the most cost effective way of doing it is through simple preventative measures, not giving fat people drugs. Rather annoying that fat people bag all the drugs and the NHS budget to boot ,when it is self-inflicted.I have inherited raised cholesterol and i go to extreme lengths to keep it in the fives as opposed to the eights,which a normal lifestyle would afford.We are talking walking twelve miles a day,denying myself saturated fat and a body fat ratio of less than 10% to try avoid the heart attacks which kill both sides of my family.Yet the fatties scoff doughnuts,don't walk,have no family history and get rewarded with the statins to have a cholesterol level in the threes and a lower chance than me of a heart attack. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Orbital Posted October 25, 2007 Report Share Posted October 25, 2007 Im confused, what has Glaxos loss of profits due to a sharp drop in sales of its Avandia diabetes drug got to do with house prices? This seems like normal creative destruction to me, a key process in any free market economy whereby inefficient and old processes are cut out. Its hard for those involved but at a macro economic level this is not a bad thing. The prob with big drug companies is that when there patents expire generic products flood the market - this is actually a good thing for us - the consumer. Unfortunately some of the biggies do make a lot of their money from one or two hugely successful drugs and leave themselves extremely vulerable in the down turn. It also means that other drug companies are now making lots of cash and will have created jobs to produce the new generic products. So whats this got to do with a HPC? Nothing. If you get sucked in by posts like this, please think carefully about where your info is coming from. Sigh. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Gone baby gone Posted October 25, 2007 Report Share Posted October 25, 2007 Im confused, what has Glaxos loss of profits due to a sharp drop in sales of its Avandia diabetes drug got to do with house prices? Because they are going to cut jobs. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7059970.stm Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Control Freak Posted October 25, 2007 Report Share Posted October 25, 2007 While I reach for my violin, I assume this statement is made in relative terms. While they might be "struggling" now, this is of course against the historical enormous profits in US and UK pharmaceuticals for decades until quite recently, but currently Asian and particularly Chinese pharmaceutical profits are exponentially up...maybe there is a connection.VP Pharmaceuticals is one of the only proper industries left in the UK, so if they are 'struggling', then this is very bad news indeed. So you play your violin (fiddle) while the UK (rome) burns. Perhaps one of the reasons that the asian (Chinese) profits are up is because of the cheap labour over there (sound familiar), the lack of regulation (I wonder how long it will be before the Sh!t hits the fan when someone dies taking some of their generic drugs in the west? I believe they have a problem with this at the moment, but it is contained within China............), the stealing of patents etc...... Buying cheap tat from China that falls apart after a few weeks is all well and good for toys etc, but would you have the same attitude to cheap 'Tat' drugs? If our manufacturing base is decimated, then this will be your only choice. Be careful what you wish for. CF Quote Link to post Share on other sites
sambino Posted October 25, 2007 Report Share Posted October 25, 2007 (edited) Will cause some job losses around my local area http://www.nwemail.co.uk/news/viewarticle.aspx?id=557389 Glaxo pay large wages for Cumbria, People who work there drive BMWs and have a lot of holidays I reckon quiet a few will be BTL investers hopefully the house prices will start to come down Edited October 25, 2007 by sambino Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Grizzly Adams Posted October 25, 2007 Report Share Posted October 25, 2007 Because they are going to cut jobs. Add them to all the unemployed estate agents. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
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