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Bristol-Myers Squibb



Bristol-Myers Squibb Company
Public(NYSE: BMY)
Founded1887
HeadquartersNew York City, New York, USA
Key peopleJames Cornelius,CEO
IndustryPharmaceutical
Employees43,000 (2005)
Websitewww.bms.com

 

Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY), colloquially referred to as BMS, is a pharmaceutical corporation, formed by a 1989 merger between pharmaceutical companies Bristol-Myers Company, founded in 1887 by William McLaren Bristol and John Ripley Myers in Clinton, NY (both were graduates of Hamilton College), and Squibb Corporation. The New York City-based company's Chairman and CEO was most recently Peter R. Dolan. Dolan was fired in September 2006 for his handling of a patent dispute over the drug Plavix, and was replaced with interim CEO James Cornelius until a new CEO is found. BMS' primary R&D sites are located in New Jersey and Connecticut, with other sites around the US, in Ireland and in other countries.

BMS is a Fortune 500 Company (#129 in 2007 list).

Bristol-Myers Squibb manufactures prescription pharmaceuticals, over-the-counter drugs and health care products in several therapeutic areas. It is also the parent company of Mead Johnson which manufactures nutritional products such as Enfamil baby formulas and infant vitamin supplements like Tri-Vi-Sol and ConvaTec, a world leader in Ostomy and wound care products. Bristol-Myers Squibb has a mission to "Extend and Enhance Human Life" and works to provide help for areas of unmet medical need.

Contents

Spokesman

Lance Armstrong has appeared in several of the company's marketing campaigns, as a survivor of testicular cancer that was treated with BMS medication.

Pharmaceuticals

The following is a list of key pharmaceutical products as found on the Bristol-Myers Squibb "At A Glance" information page, retrieved 2006-09-28.

Taxol

At one time, BMS held the solitary contract to harvest the bark of endangered yew trees on United States territory for the manufacture of chemotherapy drug paclitaxel (Taxol). Current paclitaxel production comes from renewable sources. BMS also held the original paclitaxel license, but there are now multiple generic producers.

Scandals and allegations

The company was involved in an accounting scandal[1] in 2002 that resulted in a significant restatement of revenues from 1999-2001. The restatement was the result of an improper booking of sales related to "channel stuffing", or the practice of offering excess inventory to customers in order to reflect higher sales numbers. The company has since settled with the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission related to this scandal, agreeing to pay $150 million but neither admitting nor denying guilt.[1]

According to an FTC consent order filed in 2003,[2] the company

engaged in a series of anticompetitive acts over the past decade to obstruct the entry of low-price generic competition for three of Bristol's widely-used pharmaceutical products: two anti-cancer drugs, Taxol and Platinol, and the anti-anxiety agent BuSpar. [...] Bristol avoided competition by abusing federal regulations in order to block generic entry; deceived the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) to obtain unwarranted patent protection; paid a would-be generic rival over $70 million not to bring any competing products to market; and filed baseless patent infringement lawsuits to deter entry by generics.

The company has also been sued in this matter by state attornies general to recover monetary damages.

A criminal investigation of the company was made public in July 2006, and the FBI raided the company's corporate offices. The investigation centered around the distribution of Plavix and charges of collusion.[3]

On September 12, 2006, a federal monitor urged the company to remove CEO Peter Dolan over the Plavix-dispute. Later that day, BMS announced that Dolan would indeed step down.[4].

References to a possible acquisition by European companies in the media

An article in The Star-Ledger from February 26th, 2006,[5] claims the company is being looked at for acquisition by European drugmakers GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis and Sanofi-Aventis. All three are at least twice as large as BMS. BMS had held merger talks with GlaxoSmithKline back in 2002, but a deal never materialized.

References

  1. ^ SEC News Digest, August 9, 2004.
  2. ^ News Release about Consent Order against Bristol-Myers, March 7, 2003
  3. ^ Business Report, 31 July 2006. Accessed 7 September 2006
  4. ^ CNN.com, 12 September 2006. Accessed 12 September 2006
  5. ^ Bristol may be in Euro-pharma's cross hairs, The Star Ledger, February 26, 2006

See also

 
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Bristol-Myers_Squibb". A list of authors is available in Wikipedia.
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