AstraZeneca CEO: We Will Achieve Our Targets Through Our Drug Pipeline Which Is Growing Very Rapidly

While talks with Pfizer are going nowhere at the moment, the best course of action for AstraZeneca plc (ADR) AZN seems to be focussing on its own drug pipeline and that’s exactly what the company seems to be doing.

Pascal Soriot, CEO of Astrazeneca, was recently on CNBC to discuss how the company’s drug pipeline is progressing and where he foresees future growth to come from.

“Two years ago people felt we would sell 20 billion by 2020 and we will be on a continuous decline, nobody is talking about this anymore. We have made very good progress and we have delivered against what we have said we would deliver. So, that should give confidence to people that our target of 45, we believe we can achieve. We will achieve it through of course our pipeline, which as people can see is growing very rapidly […]”

“We actually have done quite a bit of business development and acquisitions. We are building our pipeline, but what we have also have done the last two years is we have accelerated some of our internal projects that were in early development and we are moving them into last stage development.”

When asked about whether he sees the consolidation trend in the pharmaceutical industry to continue, Lundgren replied, “Whether we will have more consolidation, I suspect we will over the next few years. Is a merger a bad thing or a good thing, I don’t think we can say it’s a bad thing or a good thing, I think we can only say, depends.”

Share of Astrazeneca were recently trading at $74.58, up 0.91%.