BAYER AG 
"Europe is making some really big mistakes," Bayer's Chief Pharmaceutical Officer Stefan Oelrich told the Financial Times in an interview published on Monday. "We are shifting our commercial footprint and the resources for our commercial footprint significantly away from Europe." This also applies to the UK. In return, Bayer wants to focus on the USA and China, where the pharmaceutical business has already established a significant market presence, said Oelrich. China has an increasingly positive attitude towards innovation, while higher drug prices in the USA enable Bayer to offset the cost explosion caused by high inflation.
In the USA, the Leverkusen-based agricultural and pharmaceutical company has strengthened its position in recent years with several multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical deals. Oelrich described Europe as "innovation-unfriendly". "European governments are trying to create incentives for research investments, but on the commercial side they are making life difficult for us. If you don't have sales, you can profit as much as you want on the cost side, but that's not a good equation." In 2021, the Bayer Pharmaceuticals Division generated just under 41 percent of its sales in the Europe, Middle East, Africa region and just under 23 percent in North America. Around 32 percent came from Asia-Pacific.
Other sectors, such as the automotive industry, have also recently criticized Europe as a business location and warned that it is at risk of being left behind by US subsidies. BASF CEO Martin Brudermüller had said that Europe was continuously losing its attractiveness and competitiveness as a location and that there was no longer much to be said for investing in the region, which he described as over-regulated.
(Report by Patricia Weiß, edited by Ralf Banser. If you have any queries, please contact our editorial team at berlin.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for politics and the economy) or frankfurt.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for companies and markets).)
