Il Nuovo Postiglione - Sanofi says board has removed CEO Paul Hudson

Belen Garijo, currently chief executive of Germany's Merck KGaA and previously a Sanofi vice president, will take over at the group's AGM in April, the company said.

"Belen Garijo's brilliant international career attests to her strategic vision and her ability to drive profound and value-creating transformations," board chairman Frederic Oudea said in a statement.

"She has the experience and profile to accelerate the pace, strengthen the quality of execution of strategy and lead the next growth cycle of the company, which is essential to build the group's future."

Hudson took over at Sanofi in 2019 after previous stints at Novartis and AstraZeneca.

His removal came less than a month after Sanofi reported that sales rose 6.2 percent last year to 43.6 billion euros ($51.8 billion).

In a statement at the time, Hudson said: "In 2026, we expect sales to grow by a high single-digit percentage and business EPS to grow slightly faster than sales.

"We anticipate profitable growth to continue over at least five years."

But analysts said Sanofi had recently suffered setbacks in drug development, and its share price has lost a fourth of its value over the past year. The stock slumped 4.5 percent on Thursday after Hudson's ousting.

The company is looking in particular for new drugs success as its blockbuster anti-inflammation treatment Dupixent, which had sales of more than 15 billion euros last year, will lose its patent protection in five years.

"Potential management change at Sanofi had been debated for a while now following Sanofi's R&D strategy hitting potholes," analysts at the investment group Jefferies said in a statement.

In December however the US Food and Drug Administration doused hopes for its tolebrutinib drug by refusing to approve it for a form of multiple sclerosis.

Sanofi's stock also took a beating last September when amlitelimab, to treat atopic dermatitis, after discouraging study results, after previously disappointing investors in May with a study failure for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Paul Hudson was "excellent at selling dreams", Jean-Louis Peyren of the Fnic-CGT pharmaceutical industry union told AFP.

"Instead of having a financier who does more marketing than anything else, we hope that if it's a doctor, she will be more focussed on treatment needs than financials," he said in reference to Garijo.

"Whether there will be more management changes (R&D?) remains to be seen, but Merck did manage to hire credible R&D operators from places like AstraZeneca," the Jefferies analysts said.

M.Lombardi--INP