Wanted: a foreign investor for Aspen
CEO vehemently defends his company against Viceroy allegations and ‘trolls’ who cast doubt on accounting policies
Stephen Saad’s pharmaceutical company Aspen, already the world’s largest emerging-market pharmaceutical firm, may soon bolster its reach through a multibillion-rand deal with a foreign multinational. Famously, Saad and Gus Attridge started Aspen in a forgettable house in Greyville, Durban in 1997. Two years later, after an audacious bid to buy SA Druggists, they had profit of R123m and R860m in debt. Today Aspen is a behemoth on six continents and the largest anaesthetics producer in the world outside the US, churning out 500 tablets a second and with annualised profit of around R11.7bn. But the past year has been tough. Saad has had to fend off a complaint from the European competition authorities, as well as criticism by "trolls" (his word) about Aspen’s accounting policies. This week, rumours surfaced (again) that the New York-based short-selling research house Viceroy would publish a new report, focusing on whether the R67bn in "intangible assets" creates too optimistic a view o...
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