Six years after taking over as chief executive, the British businessman Paul Hudson has clearly left his mark at Sanofi. He arrived at the heart of a difficult period for the pharmaceutical group, mired in a painful phase of stagnation, with the pandemic set to begin just a few months later.
The task, then, was to reinvigorate it and, above all, to prepare for the future, notably by reducing its heavy dependence on Dupixent, the blockbuster that still in 2025 accounted for a third of Sanofi's revenue, and whose patent expires in 2031.
To that end, Hudson has opened his shareholders' chequebook and overseen $25bn in acquisitions in a string of smaller deals and one big-ticket purchase: US-based Blueprint Medicines, bought this year for $9.5bn, financed in part by proceeds from the sale of Doliprane - a transaction whose merits, despite the opprobrium, MarketScreener had at the time praised.
These deals have not yet had an accretive effect on the group's net profit. At most, shareholders can take comfort in remembering that, historically, Sanofi has been a very capable integrator and developer when it comes to acquisitions and partnerships. Dupixent with Regeneron comes to mind, as do Beyfortus with AstraZeneca and Altuviiio with Bioverativ.
The picture is decidedly less flattering when it comes to in-house R&D, admittedly. Sanofi, it should be said, has nevertheless racked up several failures that earned it bad press. In 2023, Hudson pledged to step up the pace. Budgets have indeed risen significantly, although the market is still waiting for a success.
Over the longer term - that is, over ten years, between 2016 and 2025 - Sanofi increased its revenue from €33.8bn to €43.6bn, and its cash profit - or free cash flow - from €5.9bn to €8.1bn, all while maintaining a high-quality balance sheet, reassuring solvency ratios, and a number of shares outstanding that is more or less unchanged.
Enterprise value, meanwhile, has not shifted, still hovering at around €100bn. In the meantime, investors' concerns - on top of a deepening loss of affection for the sector in recent years - have grown, as evidenced by valuation multiples near their lows and a dividend yield near its high.
That context has, moreover, been put to use by Sanofi, which completed this year a €5bn share buyback program - a record-sized envelope, ambitious and rational given its valuation at the time.
The sacrosanct dividend also continues to rise uninterruptedly for the 25th consecutive year, with a further 5.1% increase set to be proposed at the next AGM.
