With Pfizer’s final stake sale in the bag, the two Big Pharma companies behind Haleon’s genesis have formally parted ways with the standalone consumer health giant.
After charting similar moves throughout 2024, Pfizer on Tuesday unveiled plans to sell roughly 662 million Haleon shares—representative of Pfizer’s entire remaining 7.3% stake in the company—to institutional investors and Haleon itself.
Under the terms of the sale, which Pfizer completed on Wednesday, the New York drugmaker pawned off roughly 618 million shares to investors at 385 pence apiece, plus another 44 million shares at the same price to Haleon directly.
All told, Pfizer is pocketing around 2.5 billion pounds ($3.2 billion) in exchange for the pieces of its position in Haleon.
Up until the sale, Pfizer—which formed the consumer health group that became Haleon with British drugmaker GSK in 2019—was Haleon's largest shareholder, Reuters reports.
GSK, for its part, originally owned 68% of Haleon before the over-the-counter company was spun out in the summer of 2022, leaving the British pharma with a 13% position versus Pfizer’s 32% stake.
From the outset, both Pfizer and GSK were clear about their intentions to whittle down their holdings in Haleon, which markets a bevy of popular household brands such as Advil, Sensodyne, Tums and Theraflu.
GSK ultimately exited the picture last May when it sold its remaining 4.2% stake in Haleon for around $1.58 billion.
Meanwhile, Pfizer’s finance chief, David Denton, said in an interview with the Financial Times in May 2023 that his company was prepared to monetize its position in Haleon in a “slow and methodical” manner.
Making good on that pledge, the company last March sold 791 million ordinary shares in a public offering and 102 million more directly to Haleon for about $3.5 billion. Then, in October, Pfizer unloaded another 640 million Haleon shares for a total return of around $3.26 billion.
Pfizer and GSK’s exit from their consumer health venture represents part of a trend in the industry, with Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Novartis and Sanofi all adopting or weighing similar strategies for their own over-the-counter or generics businesses.
For all of 2024, Haleon generated total sales of 11.23 billion pounds (around $14.6 billion), down slightly from the 11.3-billion-pound haul the company reported in 2023. As for this year, Haleon said in a recent earnings report that it aims to foster organic revenue growth of 4% to 6%.