Sanofi-Aventis SWOT Analysis

A multination pharmaceutical company is having its head office in Paris, France. The company was founded in 2004, when Aventis was acquired by Sanofi-Synthelabo, however both the companies basically emerged in 1999.   Major Therapist concerns including Thrombosis, vaccines, cardiovascular, diabetes, internal medicine, central nervous system and oncology are being dealt successfully.

Strengths

• European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations has given its full membership to Sanofi Aventis.

• Sanofi Aventis is the world largest producer of vaccines.

• In last years it had block buster sales of almost 30 billion Euros.

• Strong global presence is the major strength of the company.

• The company is very well known for its prescription sales as it is holding fourth position throughout the world.

• The firm has been developed over the counter medication, primarily manufacturing and marketing in prescription sales.

• A very well organized and smoothly running research and development sector.

• Publicly funded research projects are also taken over along with internal research, thus making collaborative research possible.

• The strong pipeline of 120 drugs remains its market value as it is and more attention can be paid to new research and development.

• The company has employed 8000 researcher globally for carrying research and development activities.

• Almost 4.6% annual increase in sales is a big achievement of the company.

• In 2010 shares earning for Genzyme the acquired company of Sanofi Aventis rose up to $70 per share.

• The block buster sale of the drugs added up €1 billion to the revenue.

• The revenue for vaccines is €3.5 billion and other business sections related to the company have the total revenue of €2.4 billion

Weaknesses

• The profitability fully relies on the few blockbuster products like Ovenex and Plavix, and their sudden sale decrease will have adverse affects as the side products are that much revenue generating.

• Refusal of research products such as obesity drug Acomplia by Food and Drug administration has threatened the company revenue in the coming years which means that their certain products needs to be modified and the research proposal should be strong enough for acceptance (Mattes, 2008).

• Generic products which are the key source of earning income are not being prepared according to the demands and their competitors enjoy the fruit of their sales bearing less manufacturing cost.

Opportunities

• The company would influence rapidly aging population and emerging markets, making a good use of their globalization power.

• Strong emerging markets in the developed countries like Brazil, Russia, India and China as they being wealthier need up to date health facilities.

Threats

• Growing generic competition forced the company to cut off employees according to the transitional needs.

• The government pressure of massive availability of drugs by cutting the healthcare costs and the company facing patent expirations for their most selling drugs would lower the gross selling rates.

• United States is the major market of Sanofi Aventis and dollar decreased rates is directly affecting the company profitability.

References

•Sanofi-Aventis ($SNY) – Big Pharma’s Q3 2010 Earnings Report – FiercePharma. (2010). Retrieved from:  http://www.fiercepharma.com/special-reports/big-pharmas-q3-2010-earnings-report Accessed February 27, 2011.

•Sanofi Aventis Official website : http://en.sanofi-aventis.com.  Accessed February 27, 2011.

•"Annual Results 2010". Sanofi-Aventis. Retrieved from http://en.sanofi-aventis.com/binaries/20110109_RESULTS2010_en_tcm28-30324.pdf. Accessed February 27, 2011.

• Mattes, WB. (2008), Public consortium efforts in toxicogenomics, Methods Mol Biol. 20