Sir Pascal Soriot has said it would be a failure of his leadership if AstraZeneca did not appoint an internal candidate to eventually succeed him, as he committed himself to leading the FTSE 100 drugs company for another five years.
Soriot, 64, has overseen the transformation of AstraZeneca since he became chief executive in 2012, turning down a £69 billion takeover offer from Pfizer and transforming the Cambridge business into one of Britain’s biggest public companies, valued at about £172 billion, after reviving its drugs pipeline.
There has been renewed speculation over his leadership after reports that he was considering stepping down next year, weakening the Anglo-Swedish company’s share price. However, Soriot said that he envisaged leading AstraZeneca for another five years before retiring at the company, as “long as I perform and deliver”.
“We have people inside the company that can replace me, and I will see it as a failure on my part if I’m not replaced by someone on my team. So there’s no hurry, there’s no issue.”
He added: “We have a very good succession planning process in place. The board reviews our own internal candidates but also we have a few people on the shortlist that are external candidates and at the appropriate time the board will pick the right person.”
Advertisement
Soriot, one of the longer serving heads of a FTSE 100 company, was speaking following the European Society for Medical Oncology congress in Madrid over the weekend, where AstraZeneca presented two late-stage clinical trials for a potential blockbuster cancer drug for lung and breast cancer.
Shares in the company also weakened in July and ahead of the congress last week as investors reduced their commercial expectations for datopotamab deruxtecan, known as Dato-DXd.
Soriot said investors had not yet ”totally digested” the data for Dato-DXd, being developed with Daiichi Sankyo of Japan, but he was confident it would support an “industry-leading growth rate” between 2025 and 2030.
He added: “I’m hoping people will stop their myopic focus on Dato-DXd and look at the rest of the portfolio.”
