Going all-in on North American prescription drugs: unwinding TAP and buying Millennium (2008)

The starting point of management that buys time

The heart of this decision was the switch from a half-committed joint venture to holding the U.S. prescription-drug business outright. Unwinding TAP brought the American sales organization inside Takeda; acquiring Millennium brought in a cancer-discovery research base. The resources Kunio Takeda had concentrated by narrowing to drugs, Hasegawa now turned toward acquiring discovery capability abroad. In this year the policy of converting profit earned at home into an operating base in the United States hardened into fact.

Buying time by buying, though, came at a price. The chain of large acquisitions that began with Millennium ran on to Nycomed and Shire; the business base widened, but lifting corporate value to match the capital deployed proved anything but easy, interest-bearing debt swelled, and the reckoning reached as far as the sale of Alinamin, the mass-market brand that had been Takeda’s signboard since the founding era. How far Takeda could grow the power to originate new drugs inside itself — the 2008 choice to own its own business in North America left that question standing over the company’s management.