Big build-up, small payoff for Aspen
Rapid expansion has taken a toll at the generic pharmaceuticals giant, with disappointing results and high turnover
Aspen’s year to June 2017 was meant to be the one in which the pharmaceutical group’s past three years of massive transformation and internationalisation were finally to pay off. “You can expect very strong earnings growth this [financial] year, especially in the second half,” CEO Stephen Saad told Financial Mail in October last year. At the half-year mark, however, it seems the company will fall short on delivery of that big promise. Far from super growth, the group managed no better than a 6% rise in normalised headline EPS (HEPS) in its half-year to December. “It was not a good result,” says Alec Abraham of Sasfin Securities. The result was all the more disappointing given that it included four months of results from AstraZeneca’s (AZ) anaesthetics portfolio outside the US. This was acquired in a US$770m deal done last September.
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