The former consumer care division of the English pharmaceutical company GSK (GlaxoSmithKline) will fly on its own.
Renamed Haleon, it will take its first steps on the London Stock Exchange on Monday.
With a valuation of 40 billion pounds (47 billion euros), this could be, according to Bloomberg, the biggest IPO of the decade, ahead of the Swiss mining group Glencore which entered the British market in 2011. at 38 billion pounds.
Because Haleon has very powerful brands within it: Sensodyne toothpaste, the painkiller Voltaren, the Nicorette range used to quit smoking, etc.
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GSK splits in two under pressure from activist shareholders (Elliot and Bluebell Capital) who considered the laboratory's performance insufficient.
GSK
“has been less successful than rivals such as AstraZeneca in recent years
,” said financial analyst Keith Bowman.
In fact, GSK shares have only gained 6% over the past five years while those of British rival AstraZeneca have more than doubled.
Thus, GSK was not one of the laboratories to release a vaccine against Covid very quickly.
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Its managing director, Emma Walm-sley, believes that this operation will
“unleash the potential of both GSK and Haleon”
.
Clearly, separated, the two companies will create more value.
Technically, shareholders of GSK, which owns 68% of this entity, will receive one Haleon share for each share held in the laboratory on Monday.
Initially, GSK will retain 6% of Haleon before disengaging.
The American pharmaceutical company Pfizer - which owns the remaining 32% - will gradually sell its shares in Haleon to focus on innovative drugs and vaccines.
GSK, on the other hand, wants to develop on niche drugs with growth of more than 5% expected in 2022. To accelerate, the laboratory is doing its market.
In April, it acquired Californian Sierra Oncology, a specialist in targeted therapies against rare forms of cancer, for $1.9 billion.
