astrazeneca

Fortune Staff

Aggregate sales hit $37.8 trillion last year—an increase of 19%, the highest annual growth rate in the list’s history.

Global 500

The 25th Fortune World’s Most Admired Companies list suggests that tech giants’ peers respect them as much as ever.

World's Most Admired Companies

Current All-Star Rank

Industry

The British-Swedish pharmaceutical giant, under the direction of its CEO Pascal Soriot, has spent the better part of a decade rebuilding a powerful research and

AstraZeneca | 2023 World's Most Admired Companies

legacy

AstraZeneca

Sector

Previous All-Star Rank

Industry Rank

Previous Industry Rank

Overall Score

Innovation

People Management

Use of Corporate Assets

Social Responsibility

Quality of Management

Financial Soundness

Long-Term Investment Value

Quality of Products/Services

Global Competitiveness

AstraZeneca | 2023 World's Most Admired Companies | Fortune

Sophie Mellor

Nasal version of the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID vaccine fails in U.K. trial

/2022/10/11/nasal-version-oxford-astrazeneca-covid-vaccine-fails-in-uk-trial/

Bloomberg

Top AstraZeneca heart drug Farxiga sees potential to reach more patients

/2022/08/27/top-astrazeneca-heart-drug-farxiga-potential-reach-more-patients/

Sy Mukherjee

IDEA Pharma

The most innovative and inventive drug companies of 2022 set the foundation for success before the pandemic

/2022/04/20/top-pharmaceutical-companies-innovation-invention-2022/

New drug that prevents you from catching COVID-19 gets green light in Europe — but it’s been in the U.S. for months and hardly anyone knows about it

/2022/03/29/astrazeneca-evusheld-covid-19-prevention-drug-given-green-light-europe/

Pascal Soriot says the AZ vaccine saved the most lives globally, and Queen Elizabeth rewards him with knighthood. 

AstraZeneca CEO: “Covid is here to stay” 

Leadership


Pascal Soriot says the AZ vaccine saved the most lives globally, and Queen Elizabeth rewards him with knighthood. 

Pascal Soriot says the AZ vaccine saved the most lives globally.

pascal welcome to fortune and thank you so much for joining us. Let's begin our conversation talking about Covid, your company Astrazeneca played a very important role in the research and delivery of a Covid vaccine. As you look back on your development efforts, What would you say were the upsides and the downsides? So if I look at this vaccine, if I look at this in Niagara and first of all, I think it was a great success in the sense that it delivered a huge impact on on this pandemic globally. We delivered 3.5 billion doses of vaccines and it has been independently estimated that we saved more than six million lives. Actually, our vaccine is the vaccine and save the most lives around the world. Now within this of course we have we faced setbacks for instance, we had challenges in deliveries of the quantities that europe was expecting of us. So we faced a few challenges like we always do with projects in our industry. But I would say overall we had a huge impact on this lower pandemic now that you can look back on that period. Is there anything you would have done differently? I can't think of anything that um not knowing what we know today, that we would have done differently now. What I would have hoped though, if something like this happened again is to start from the very beginning, we joined the University of Oxford in May of 2020 And they had already done a lot of work. Other companies started, they started their projects in January February of 2020. And these five months of difference created of course a big of a bit of a hurdle for us in terms of catching up to the work that needed to be done to bring this development to what was required for global regulators around the world. So I would have hoped to start earlier. But other than that, I think we just gave it our best shot. If I may say so. Well, I'm sure you've learned so much about covid over the last 2.5 years from everything that you've learned is covid here to stay. I mean, do you see a day where we won't be talking about Covid infections and hospitalizations? I think Covid is here to stay and most experts would agree with that. I'm hoping that time will come when we don't talk as much about it because we've learned to live with it. People get boosted with regular vaccine injections. Probably older people need to be boosted more often than young healthy people. And but we will learn to live with it and manage it just like we managed the flu and many other of our whole diseases. So pascal what's your vision for Astrazeneca? What do you want it to be best known for? We want to be known as a company that follows the science and innovate and discovers products that will really change the treatment of important diseases and cancer cardiovascular disease, respiratory diseases like asthma COPD rare diseases and more recently we engaged in infectious diseases for vaccines and immune therapy. And ultimately we want to be seen as a company that really shapes the future of medicine. Well it's a year now since you bought Alexey in, you paid almost $40 billion for this pharma company based in the United States, how does seleccion fit into your plans? It fits very well actually. And it helps us expand our portfolio to include rare disease medicines and it's gone very well so far we are using the Dominican network globally to bring the election products to a variety of countries china emerging markets and so we are really helping them distribute the products globally. And our research and development teams are also working together. So the Alex and team can leverage their technologies to deliver to develop and and deliver new medicines for rare diseases. So it's going very well so far well do you have a blockbuster drug that's in the works and ready for the market? Yes, we are helping election globalized product that they launched recently called Ramirez which is a product that addresses a variety of rare diseases. The more recent set of data we got was in a disease called an M. O. S. D. Which is a disease that affects the optical nerve and and essentially people go blind. It's an awful disease because you lose your eyesight and you recover it and use it again another period of time. It gets worse and worse and you become blind. And until now the treatments were not really very, very strong and very good. And so this this compound really has tremendous clinical results. You mentioned that you are also doing a lot with cancer drugs and treatments. What other promising drugs do you have in the pipeline that would interest our viewers to, which is a product that is used for the treatment of breast cancer and has recently shown absolutely outstanding results. Well, it sounds like you have some really big plans for Astrazeneca. Do you intend to go it alone or are you open to a merger? We have the critical mass. We have global footprint. We have large turnover, large resources so we don't need a merger. And suddenly that's not our priority. A priority is more to do what we call Burton acquisitions, which is to complement our own pipeline with products we acquire from the outside. Are you interested more as being a buyer or a seller? Well, we are mostly a buyer. We are in a position today that we can definitely consider acquiring products or companies. But again, as I said, mostly small to mid sized companies that we can add to our portfolio. And next Allergic stands for us to complement what we are doing. Well, you know, investors still talk about fighters, huge offer to buy Astrazeneca from a couple of years ago. Any regrets or second thoughts about that, that merger didn't go through? Well, first of all they have learned in life. Do not regret what I've done in the past. But in that instance we only tell you that Asher price in the last 10 years has got report it is today $67 and it has doubled since Faisal made the offer. So I think the sharp price evolution over the last few years since Faisal made the offer has demonstrated that we could create a lot of value on our own for our shareholders, but also more importantly for patients, we have brought to patients many, many new medicines that make a big difference to the treatment of cancer, cardiovascular disease and many other conditions. So no regrets of that. You could have been a much bigger company? Well, actually, no regret. I mean in our industry really the focus has to be to innovate and come up with new medicines. It's very simple. You have to help patients with new innovative medicines. The goal can be to be very big. It has to be to innovate and create value for innovation and that's what we've done. Well, let's talk a little bit about leadership and your leadership pascal Astrazeneca is a much stronger company too. When you took over back in 2012, what do you see as the key thing that you did as a Ceo and as a leader to transform Astrazeneca into a powerhouse pharma company, you mentioned that your stock is almost quadruples during your leadership, but also you've gotten sales and revenues are so much stronger. So what was the most important thing that you did to pull this all off? I think making clear choices and choosing innovation and science, which many people might say today is obvious, but 10 years ago the industry was in a different place. So creating this focus and this set of choices, building a team. We have a tremendous team today, um you know, attracting the right people who can make a big difference and finally creating a culture where people really share a common ambition, which is to be an innovator and a company that wants to shape the future of medicine. Well, you're celebrating your 10th anniversary as Ceo, what are you most proud that you've done in this last decade? What's your proudest accomplishment? Well actually, you know, to see the impact that our medicines are having on patients is really extremely rewarding. I can tell you, I was at this council congress in Chicago a few months ago at the ASco and being in the room and have tens of thousands of oncology is from around the world giving a standing ovation to results were presented. They're not, we, but the investigators are presented is incredibly rewarding because you know, you're shaping the future of medicine, you're shaping the way cancer is treated. So that's what I'm the most proud of. And of course the team and the people working for the company and to see them grow and develop has been incredibly rewarding. Well, you were recently awarded a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth for your contributions to science and all of your work on the Covid vaccine. So Sir, pascal, what's your reaction to this high honor? What does it mean to you? It's incredibly humbling. Um You know, I come from very modest beginnings um and my career has been, you know, moving around the world, always focused on pharmaceuticals and bringing new medicines to the market. And being rewarded with this knighthood by the Queen is of course incredibly humbling and something I had to take a little bit of time to get my head around because, you know, I'm not british and this has been quite a quite a quite a remarkable achievement for me.

This year’s list focuses on the access and equitable distribution of vaccines.

Change the World 2021: Vaccine Makers

Franchise_Lists

Change the World 2021: Vaccine Makers


one thing that's interesting about this year's list as we have the same honoree in the number one slot. And that's the vaccine makers. But what's different this year is that we've focused on the issue of access and equitable distribution of vaccines. And some companies have been really good at that, including astrazeneca, including johnson and johnson. Even in the clinical trial program that we started that we went not only to the United States but to africa where a very significant proportion of our clinical trial participants resided. We went to latin America, particularly brazil. Those also happen to be the places were some of the most virulent, some of the most pernicious uh mutations and variants were occurring at that particular point in time until we are able to manage this on a global basis. Uh We're not safe and we won't get lives back to normal. Hence all the more important to have a global option against covid 19. We tried to find the vaccine almost in every country at the same time. Typically we file in your hop in the U. S. And Japan for new medicine. And then and then we file elsewhere month or two later and here we tried to file almost everywhere at the same time. So it's a big effort to make sure we can bring this vaccine. It's no profit to as many people as possible around the world. The pandemic is still very much with us And that's what's really changed the course of the pandemic and is changing the course of the pandemic is how quickly these companies managed to develop a new technology distributed around the world, is making a major difference for the health of people everywhere. Yeah. Mhm. Mhm.

AstraZeneca Vaccine: Why are there so many concerns?

Health

AstraZeneca is a large pharmaceutical company that is part British and part Swedish but is based in Cambridge, England. So AstraZeneca dug himself a hole, and it's gonna have to try to get out of that hole and repair its credibility. It said. Its vaccine with 79% effective and very strangely overnight, this independent group of, uh, physicists and statisticians called the Data Safety and Monitoring Board. They sent a rather unprecedented letter to both, uh, AstraZeneca and also to the National Student Health, saying that they were not happy with the way AstraZeneca had presented these numbers. But 79% number was too high. It said that the more recent data showed a lower efficacy number. Now, two days later, AstraZeneca released analysis of the updated results all the way through the current time, and it showed basically the same, but slightly less it showed 76% efficacy cut off threshold, the FDA set with 50%. Even if you take the lowest conference number from this latest clinical trial, it's still over 60% effective, so it's probably going to get approved in the US. The question, though, is given that the US has already approved several vaccines that have higher efficacy numbers. You know, Are they actually going to need the answers and the vaccine? That is a really kind of big open question. But where this really matters is actually not not in the US or the UK or or the but in the developing world. Because the AstraZeneca vaccine, um, it's been the one that people have been counting on to vaccinate the vast majority of people in low and middle income countries. That's because the vaccine is very inexpensive compared to the others, and it is also can be stored at normal refrigerator temperatures, which makes it much easier to transport and to distribute in places that don't have, um, reliable electricity, your access to very, um, expensive, specialized refrigeration units, which you need for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine. So I think the issue is whether having, you know, damage their credibility here, whether this is going to cause a problem for people's willingness to take the vaccine in the developing world, and that could be a problem for everyone. Of course, because, um, if people in developing world don't get vaccinated, the disease will continue to spread their there's more chance of mutation. Those mutations may eventually kind of escape all the vaccines. So, you know, this is a big problem. We need to get people vaccinated all over the world. And AstraZeneca vaccine was thought to be very important in that effort.

AstraZeneca

Company Information

World's Most Admired Companies
As of 2/1/2023

AstraZeneca

Company Information

World's Most Admired CompaniesAs of 2/1/2023

World's Most Admired Companies
As of 2/1/2023