We thank François Gaudement for this text, and of course our speakers Jérémie Urbain (Serb) and Patrice and Sabine Débregeas who were kind enough to explain the business case of their respective companies, innovative French-based pharmaceutical companies.
Minutes of meeting, 18th of February 2008
Speaker 1 : Jérémie Urbain, CEO of Laboratoire Serb
Jérémie studied economics
at Paris Dauphine before he joined Credit Lyonnais (now LCL) in the late 90s.
His parents are pharmacists and owned several successive drug retail business.
His father sold his last pharmacy in 1998.
In parallel Jeremie’s father was managing a small pharma company, called
Laboratoire Serb that he acquired
in 1983 (founded in 1955) and that was distributing in vivo dying products
imported from the US.
Jeremie joined Laboratoire Serb in 1999 as sales manager and in 2000 an
unfortunate incident pushed Jeremie to replace his father at the head of.the
company. During a transition period of 12 months he took charge of the
operations. Eventually he became CEO of organization in 2001
Key figures
- Turnover: 3,1m in 1999, 15,5m in 2008. Earnings in 2007: 2,5m€
- 15 people, incl. 7 pharmacists
Key strategic orientations
since 2001
- Outsourcing of all manufacturing & distribution activities.
- Focus on R&D and marketing
- External growth through acquisition of molecules sold by big pharmas
& development of products through collaboration with big institutions like
Inserm, Institut Pasteur, CNRS, APHP.
- Reengineering of the products portfolio. From 33 to 25 max
molecules; stop of molecules of turnover below 200k€ with no added value for
patients.
- In addition of the historical products (injectable dying
colorants), acquisition of other niches products in ophthalmology and critical
care medicine (against poisoning, intoxications, anti-venom). Some of them
proved to be very successful after September 11; and opportunistic acquisition
of anti epileptic product, specific antibiotics and hormones.
From a management
perspective, employees reckon to be motivated working for such an SME because
tasks are very diverse; opportunity to touch on every aspects of the business.
However it is often difficult to retain people after circa 5 years when they
look for positions with greater responsibilities in larger organization
Speaker 2: Patrice and Sabine Debregeas
Patrice (MBA Wharton) has a long career in the pharmaceutical industry. Built “SI Pharm” (?), whose activities have been focused on managing licenses and B2B business. Patrice sold this company to Astorg when it reached a size of circa 800 people across Europe, US, China and India
He reinvested the money to found D&A, which he managed with his daughter Sabine (MBA ISA). Big investments have been recently made to acquire from Johnson & Johnson a 7000m2 site, where 15 people will soon develop new products
International exposure since the very beginning
Activities
- Galienic enhancement of well-known active ingredients
- Example: enhanced form of subutex, which enables injection without pain
- Focus on wide-spread addictions
- Development in parallel (simultaneous) in Europe and the US
- Manufacturing is outsourced
- In-house marketing activities
Financials
- Missed IPO scheduled in 2001. Thus business fully owned by family
- Government helps are often limited and too time-consuming in follow-up to worth the effort filing. Other options: OSEO, CRITT Chimie but limited
- On the other hand investments funds are nowadays willing to take more risks than they used to.
- 20 m cash available today at D&A for further investments
Legal environment
Patrice argues that it is actually easier today than it was to deal with legal constraints. Indeed even if laws rules are complex, information is easily and quickly available
Management
- Quite easy to motivate R&D and sales staff with challenging and exciting projects.
- Financial rewards possible as well; 2 managers took the opportunity to create a new subsidiary for 49% of the subsidiary’s equity
- Much harder to retain regulatory affairs and quality functions that are quickly aspiring to take more responsibility in
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