“I am a change agent,” declared Emma Walmsley soon after she became chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline in 2017 and, sure enough, the UK’s second largest pharmaceutical company does indeed look different from eight years ago.
The consumer health division has gone – it was demerged as Haleon in 2023, which ended the debate about whether GSK required a bigger break-up. And annual budgets for research and development in pharmaceuticals and vaccines have been doubled in her time, which got to the core of the drugmaker’s ills.
