You could have made good money during Dame Emma Walmsley’s eight years as chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline by buying the shares whenever they fell to £13 and shorting them whenever they hit £18. The yo-yo pattern has repeated three or four times. Optimism breaks out regularly, but something always turns up to spoil the mood.
Lockdown during the Covid pandemic meant patients couldn’t get out for their shingles jabs, a critical product for GSK. When that cloud cleared, an enormous legal wrangle over Zantac, a heartburn drug from the 1990s, appeared. The settlement was financially tolerable in the end, but last year’s downer was the US regulator’s decision to limit the age range for use of a new vaccine for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) for older adults, quickly followed by the appointment of vaccine sceptic Robert F Kennedy as the US secretary of health and human services. The shares, having touched £18 in May 2024, were once again at £13 by November.
