Old pharmaceutical giant seeks a pill for all its ills

Mr Franz Humer is showing a clutch of visitors around Roche's Basle headquarters. The chairman and chief executive of the Swiss healthcare group is pointing to an electronic map on which Roche's sites are marked with little lights scattered across the globe.

It is the day after Mr Humer has announced that 3,000 jobs, or 8 per cent of the workforce, are to be axed - a restructuring exercise unusual in the profitable drugs industry. Before long, one or two of the lights will be extinguished, although the Co Clare plant, which employs 250 people, will be spared. These are not happy times for Roche, the secretive, century old company that only five years ago topped the world pharmaceuticals league. Now it languishes at number 11, $200 billion (€235.6 billion) smaller in terms of market capitalisation than Pfizer, the industry leader. Its flagship pharmaceuticals division has stopped growing.

That is not all. There have been noisy management bustups, culminating in the sacking last month of the finance director. Grimmer still, a few days earlier, a fifth of Roche's voting shares somehow - inexplicably - fell into the hands of Novartis, the arch-rival pharmaceuticals group that glowers at Roche across the Rhine. Talk of an eventual merger is rife. It is a quintessentially Swiss drama involving two of the country's biggest companies and the ancient family that controls Roche. Into its midst has wandered Mr Humer, an Austrian by birth, who was recruited in 1995 from Glaxo, and took over the chairmanship just a few weeks ago.

"The spokesman of the family pool has confirmed that the families are firmly committed to our strategy," he says, referring to Mr Fritz Gerber, the Swiss lawyer who ran Roche for 20 years and who now represents the secretive heirs of Mr Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche, the founder. They control 50.1 per cent of the votes with only 10 per cent of the equity, thanks to a peculiarly Swiss share structure that dates back seven decades.

As well as receiving unwanted attention from Novartis, Roche has suffered from falling sales of prescription drugs - and this in an industry in which doubledigit growth comes easily. Performance has been particularly disappointing at Roche's US subsidiary, based in New Jersey, once the driving force behind the company's growth but now the victim of the bulk of Mr Humer's job cuts.

That in itself is a worrying sign. Cutting back in the US while other companies, including Novartis, are scrabbling to build up resources in what is easily the world's most lucrative pharmaceuticals market appears to reflect a lack of ambition. Nor is it encouraging to see Roche rein in its research and development expenditure - the lifeblood of any pharmaceuticals company. Mr Humer shrugs off the implied criticism. "It became clear to us that there was a mismatch between the resources needed and the resources at hand," he says. "We made the cuts that we believe are necessary in order not to hurt the growth potential of the products and the company. If the situation changes in the future, Roche has the flexibility to expand and contract [its] resources. "

Talk of crisis is overdone, he says. Roche does not need to take drastic action to fill what some analysts see as the yawning gap in its pipeline of future drugs. "I look at our medium- to long-term pipeline and I feel quite comfortable that we will be able to bring major new drugs to the market in the years to come."

Yet in the short term, the company faces difficulties. Moneyspinners such as Rocephin, an antibiotic, face stiff competition. The company has also lost its patent on Dormicum, an anaesthetic from the same chemical family as Valium, the tranquilliser that once generated Roche's vast wealth.

"Growth [from new products] has not been sufficient to cover the full impact of the patent expiry," he concedes with some understatement. "But our established brands were - and are - growing quite strongly."

Recovery is on its way, he insists. He believes the company can revive the fortunes of Xenical, the obesity drug that raced to sales of 950 million Swiss francs (€623 million) in its first year but stalled in its second.

The company will introduce other drugs, such as Pegasys for hepatitis C and ibandronate for osteoporosis, which also have huge potential, he says. And Roche does not get proper recognition for leading cancer drugs discovered by Genentech, a Californian biotechnology company controlled by Roche.

Does his confidence mean he sees no need to make a strategic move, as many analysts believe he must? Some say that, with the job cuts out of the way, Mr Humer is bound to present Roche's board with a proposal for a merger or an acquisition. If not, they argue, it will become hard to resist the siren calls of the faster-growing Novartis.

In the 1990s Roche made a habit of launching daring raids on what turned out to be excellent assets, picking up Genentech, Syntex and Boehringer Mannheim. But some suggest all the bargains have gone. "There is never a last bride," Mr Humer says. "There are always new opportunities that arise."

He says he would prefer to solve any pipeline problems through several deals, each of which would involve a single drug, rather than one deal for an entire company. Certainly, he says, a merger with Novartis does not figure in his plans.