'No regrets,' says newly retired JP Garnier

One week after retirement, GlaxoSmithKline ex-CEO Jean-Pierre Garnier (photo) says he has few regrets. Despite the company's lackluster stock performance and decline in price-earnings ratio, he's sanguine about his legacy. He supported vaccines, long an unpopular sector of the drug market, but increasingly a hot spot for development and sales. He broke R&D into smaller units in hopes of boosting innovation, and though the jury's still out on the results, he's sure the move improved productivity. Plus, he forged the merger of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham into "a single company with a very strong culture," he told the Financial Times.

In fact, Garnier says he has no regrets. He admits that he wishes he'd done dozens of things differently--namely spreading the safety data on Avandia around sooner. (The diabetes med has lost a big chunk of market share since a study raised safety concerns last year.) But he says, "The legacy of GSK...is ahead of us."

- see the interview in the Financial Times

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