It’s a miracle. A mere 25 years after Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham merged to form GSK, the share price on Wednesday got back to where the combo started life – a shade over £20. It has been a very long wait.
A quarter of a century ago, the bosses of the day spoke about creating a “Microsoft of the pharmaceutical world” that would develop new medicines in never-seen-before quantities at faster speeds. A vast new head office in west London was opened by Tony Blair in 2002 to mirror the ambition. By then, however, the share price had already halved as investors twigged that, for all the fanfare, the mega-merger was really about bulking up defensively. The first decade was a blur of expiring patents, clashing egos, quarrels over executive pay and yet more promises of jam tomorrow.
