Teva isn’t the only one that suffered as its stock took a beating over the past 12 months. Allergan has felt the pain, too—and the company finally has the ability to do something about it.
Allergan, which acquired a 9.9% stake in the Israeli drugmaker last year as part of the pair’s $40 billion-plus generics deal, currently stands as Teva’s largest shareholder. Those shares, worth $5.3 billion when Allergan acquired them, have been locked down for the last year, with Allergan unable to sell them, Israeli newspaper Globes reports. And in that time, they’ve dropped more than $2 billion in value to $3.2 billion.
As of Wednesday, though, Allergan—which has said it wasn’t a “long-term holder” of Teva’s stock—can do as it pleases. So far, it hasn’t said whether it plans to dump the stake this year, with CFO Maria Teresa Hilado telling shareholders on February’s fourth-quarter 2016 earnings call that “in August we will evaluate whether we would sell.”
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If it does, though, Teva could be in for even more pain than it’s already faced in the two years since it said it’d be snapping up Allergan’s generics unit, Actavis. Between then and now, shares have plunged 55% as skepticism over that deal, a botched buy of Mexico’s Rimsa, badly missed sales forecasts, a slew of exec exits and more took their toll. The result? Teva’s market cap currently sits at around $31.49 billion, less than the company paid for Actavis in the first place, Globes notes.
And things haven’t yet shown signs of getting better. While Teva’s interim chairman, Celgene vet Sol Barer, has promised to bring in “the absolute best person from anywhere” to take up the CEO post, the company so far hasn’t announced a successor to Erez Vigodman, who exited in February. Last month, rumors swirled that AstraZeneca chief Pascal Soriot had agreed to come over, but they died almost as abruptly as they began.
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Meanwhile, industry-wide pressure in the generics sector has been giving the company grief, and Wells Fargo analyst David Maris said on Wednesday that he sees no light at the end of the tunnel. “Based on recent IMS data, and recent cautionary commentary about the U.S. generics market from numerous manufacturers, we believe that the U.S. generic drug environment may be worsening and that Mylan and Teva may be experiencing this negative trend as well,” he wrote in a note to clients.