Speaker 1: You're listening to Taking Stock with Kathleen Hayes and Pim
Speaker 1: Fox on Bloomberg Radio. Breaking news from a Latin America,
Speaker 1: Columbia's Central Bank, Columbia, I should say, raising their lending
Speaker 1: rate to seven percent from six and a half percent.
Speaker 1: That's a fifty basis point move, much more than analysts
Speaker 1: have been forecasting. As inflation surges to its highest level
Speaker 1: since two thousand one after the worst drought in decades.
Speaker 1: A big story will be covering in the three o'clock
Speaker 1: Wall Street Time hour of Taking Stock. Now, let's get
Speaker 1: to another very big story today. Valiant Pharmaceuticals attempting to
Speaker 1: put the worst of its problems behind it today announcing
Speaker 1: a shake up of its board and filling along awaited
Speaker 1: annual report where it excuse me, filing along awaited annual
Speaker 1: report where it promised significant changes to its strategy and
Speaker 1: better oversight of its executives. This Credoholo joins US now
Speaker 1: specialty Pharma and Biotech analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence. So, Liz,
Speaker 1: a big move from Valiant. Yeah, I would say that,
Speaker 1: you know, the company had been saying April nine, where
Speaker 1: we are going to file by them, even though they
Speaker 1: had much more of a cushion with their lenders, so
Speaker 1: in terms of keeping its integrity, which is already completely
Speaker 1: battered at this point, they really needed to file by today,
Speaker 1: So meeting that deadline was certainly a positive. I think
Speaker 1: that the company is very focused on the fact that
Speaker 1: they have new management in place. Now. We have Joe
Speaker 1: Papo joining from Parago. He's slated to begin his reign
Speaker 1: in May. And with the new board shake up, you know,
Speaker 1: they're kind of saying we are an entirely new company.
Speaker 1: Any update on the investigation that is ongoing by the SEC. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that is still ongoing. We saw the Senate price
Speaker 1: probe earlier this week as well, and in that discussion
Speaker 1: Bill Ackman essentially said, I'm going to go back to
Speaker 1: the board. We're going to discuss slashing the price of
Speaker 1: some of these drugs that we've increased. He suggested perhaps
Speaker 1: a thirty percent cut across the board. But again, I
Speaker 1: mean this is on products that have gone up five
Speaker 1: so at that point, what's giving it back not really
Speaker 1: all that great. That's what would you say. The biggest
Speaker 1: challenge is for this this new management team. One, I
Speaker 1: think they need to get investors back on their side.
Speaker 1: There are certainly people who have been burned by this company,
Speaker 1: yet there are still many that are loyal. But they
Speaker 1: still need to convince them that they're capable of turning
Speaker 1: the ship around. But I think one of the bigger
Speaker 1: things is really going to be returning to the growth
Speaker 1: levels that they had seen. I mean, that was what
Speaker 1: had attracted investors to begin with. They were this m
Speaker 1: and A powerhouse picking up assets that were, you know,
Speaker 1: they claimed undervalued, but essentially they increased the price to
Speaker 1: drive sales. I don't think we'll see that same level
Speaker 1: of growth that investors are used to, so they need
Speaker 1: to convince them that this new model is something that's
Speaker 1: still attractive. It's not going to be the same as
Speaker 1: one Investors had initially gone after borrow money, spend the
Speaker 1: money on other pharmaceutic golden drug companies, lay people off
Speaker 1: for cut costs, increased the price of drugs. That was
Speaker 1: kind of the business models that accurate absolutely. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's that's the harsh reality of it. How do you
Speaker 1: do a one eight on that now, while at the
Speaker 1: same time throwing X executives under the bus. And I'm
Speaker 1: thinking of Howard Schiller and Tanya Carol. Right, these are
Speaker 1: Howard Schiller was the former CFO and uh Tanya carrout
Speaker 1: of former corporate controller. Yeah, and Schiller took the rain
Speaker 1: when Pearson went into the hospital, so you know, he's
Speaker 1: he's been around, he's been there when the company needed him,
Speaker 1: and now he's you know, the scapegoat on pretty much
Speaker 1: all things. I think the difficulty will be that most
Speaker 1: of their products, when you look at them, they're not
Speaker 1: like the traditional blockbuster that you might think of. So
Speaker 1: one of their leading drugs that they recently acquired from
Speaker 1: salex for it's called FAS and it's for IBS, essentially
Speaker 1: brought in two fifty million dollars last year. That's not
Speaker 1: you know, the kind of products that we're seeing out
Speaker 1: of someone like Fiser, who's key product is something like
Speaker 1: seven billion dollars. These are it's a collection of very
Speaker 1: small products. I just wanted to say, and I'll take
Speaker 1: responsibility for it. I b S is irritable bows syndrome.
Speaker 1: That's correct. Maybe they would have a little bit of
Speaker 1: that at all. Right, thank you very much. Liz grud
Speaker 1: A Hollow, a specialty format and biotechnology analyst for Bloomberg
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