Sanofi to plow $6B into vaccines

If anyone harbors doubts that vaccines are hot properties in today's pharma world, an announcement from Sanofi-Aventis should take care of them. Sanofi says it expects global vaccine sales to double to $34 billion by 2016, and so it plans to invest some $6 billion to expand its production capacity to meet that huge increase in demand. The company will be adding onto current plants and building new ones, at 15 manufacturing sites in all.

Partially driving that mushrooming demand is another big growth area for pharma: the developing world. Sanofi's vaccines CEO says economic growth in emerging markets will goose vaccine demand because as people earn more, they're more likely to seek out immunizations for themselves and their children.

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