Pfizer CEO to Meet with Starboard Value Executives

(Reuters) – Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla plans to meet key executives of activist hedge fund Starboard Value next week, according to a report by the Financial Times on Tuesday.

Bourla and Shantanu Narayen, Pfizer’s lead independent director and Adobe Systems CEO, will hold discussions with Starboard CEO Jeff Smith and Patrick Sullivan, who oversees its healthcare investments.

Earlier reports indicated that Starboard Value had acquired a stake of approximately $1 billion in Pfizer and was urging the company to implement changes to improve its performance.

Starboard had approached Ian Read, a former Pfizer CEO, and Frank D'Amelio, the company’s former CFO, both of whom showed interest in assisting the activist investor, as per sources.

Pfizer declined to comment, while Starboard Value did not respond immediately to requests for comments from Reuters.

CEO Bourla, who has been at the helm since 2019, has been striving to rejuvenate Pfizer following a decline from pandemic-era peaks, affected by dwindling sales of its COVID-19 products.

Since 2020, Bourla has spent around $70 billion on acquisitions, including a $43 billion purchase of Seagen last year, along with launching cost-saving initiatives.

The pharmaceutical giant has faced challenges in discovering a product to compensate for lost revenues from its COVID vaccine and treatment pill, struggling with the launch of its respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine and encountering disappointing clinical data from an obesity medication it was developing.

The specifics of Starboard's recommendations for Pfizer were not immediately clear, the FT report noted.