Admiral extends his curse with senior managers

BarcelonaAlmirall pharmaceuticals has become a high-risk profession for top managers. The departure of Gianfranco Nazzi, CEO since May 2021, was announced on Thursday. The Italian executive, who came from AstraZeneca, has been in this position for just 18 months. In a statement, the company explained that Nazzi is leaving the company “to face new professional challenges”. In the same information the council designated the current president of the company, Carlos Gallardo, as interim CEO while the group looks for a replacement for Nazzi.

While Almirall is looking for a new chief executive, those responsible for the family pharmaceutical can reflect on the events that have happened at the top of the company in the last decade. In 2011, the patriarch and all-powerful president of the Catalan multinational, Jorge Gallardo, rejected his son Jorge for the position of CEO (a role that in practice represented the status of heir to the presidency). This manager was dedicated to the management of Goodgrower, one of the investment vehicles of the Gallardos, with particular weight in the Vithas hospital group.

Once discarded his eldest son, Jorge Gallardo offered the position of CEO to another son, in this case Carlos Gallardo. At the time the story did not transcend, but as he published The confidentialCarlos Gallardo declined the proposal, which caused a family schism that led him, even, to move away from the family and go abroad to distance himself for a few months from the president of the pharmaceutical company.

The family company, accustomed to a certain stability at the top, has chained executives since 2011

After those events, Jorge Gallardo decided on the company’s financial director, Eduardo Sanchiz, as CEO. This bet by a person outside the family was never complete, because Gallardo, due to his temperament and status as president and owner, continued to control the company. Unfortunately for Sanchiz, the group was headed for some difficult years. In 2014, he sold his respiratory business to AstraZeneca for nearly 1 billion euros, but problems would soon follow. In 2017 it encountered a succession of embezzlements at its US subsidiary, Aqua Pharmaceuticals, which led to losses of 300 million euros and the fall of almost 42% of the company’s stock market value in just two months That crisis ended with Sanchez.

Guenter’s void

To replace him, the Gallardo brothers bet on a manager from Sanofi, Peter Guenter, who straightened out the situation and signed a long three-year contract with the Barcelona company before being recruited for the health division of the Danish giant Maersk . When he left of his own volition, Almirall opted for Nazzi, a manager who has barely had a year and a half to implement his ideas. Why has his stage been so short?

Pharmaceutical sources point to two hypotheses: the first, that it was not achieving the intended goals. “In the sector there are companies that show you the yellow first and give you a second chance, but the Gallardos are to be shown directly the red”, they explain. The other possibility has to do with an important change that has occurred recently: in February of this year, Jorge Gallardo handed over the presidency of the group, after 34 years in the position, to his son Carlos, the same in his day he had rejected the possibility of being CEO. And the sources consulted point out that it is possible that Carlos Gallardo did not feel comfortable with a first manager who had been the personal choice of his father and uncle but not his.

27,6 M€

Profits of the company in the first six months of the year, when in the same semester of 2021 the profit was €57 M

It is worth saying that the results of pharmaceuticals (the largest among the Catalan companies if we leave aside the hemoderivatives giant Grifols) have not been particularly bright in these last two years: Almirall closed 2021 with an improvement in sales from 814 to 836 million, but saw ebitda and net result fall. In this first half of the year, the dynamic has been maintained: the turnover has grown to 436 million, but the ebitda and the net result fall (in the latter case, from 57 to 27 million euros).

The conclusion of all this is clear: in the last two years, Almirall has had three CEOs (soon, it must be assumed, there will be four) and two presidents. And all of this has come in a context in which the second generation of the Gallardos still has shareholder control of the company while the third is beginning to manage it.