My reflections on 2021:
a year of building the foundations for future growth

Set within a complicated and challenging global picture, 2021 has been a year of transition and recovery, providing a unique opportunity to rethink, rebuild, and secure a future which seeks to address the challenges we face in healthcare.

At ADVANZ PHARMA, our driving purpose is to improve the lives of patients by enhancing the critical medicines they depend on, and in 2021 we effectuated a lens shift towards growth, which has enabled us to broaden patient access and optimise health outcomes. As we enter this next phase of our journey, I will be transitioning to a new role in early 2022, as special advisor to the Board, and look forward to seeing the company’s trajectory in the New Year under the leadership of Steffen Wagner, currently a member of the executive management team at STADA Arzneimittel AG, who will be taking over as CEO. He will be joined by Andreas Stickler, previously CFO of Merck Healthcare, part of Merck KGaA, as CFO. These changes cement our commitment to our vision of becoming the partner of choice for complex medicines in Europe, and I’m confident will further accelerate our growth.

Investing in our products is a core element of our growth plan and will continue to be pivotal under our new leadership team. This year the company was acquired by Nordic Capital, which has been a significant step in accelerating our access to capital, enabling considerable investment in our organic and inorganic pipeline. This deal demonstrates the vision and possibilities within ADVANZ PHARMA, through the provision of new opportunities, expertise to drive growth, and enhancement of our product offerings. We continue to invest in our pipeline and will be looking to add to our portfolio of complex medicines in the anti-infectives, critical care and endocrinology therapy areas as a key focus in the coming years.
  
Off the back of our strong capabilities across regulatory, market access, medical and commercial specialties, we will continue to explore opportunities to broaden our portfolio optimisation and extension. There are continuous opportunities to add value to existing molecules through incremental innovation, and this year, we saw the first European launch of our own value-added medicine, which was developed around healthcare professional and patient need. The success of this has provided a proof point for the company’s strategy and goal to become a go-to partner for commercialising complex medicies in Europe; an ambition that we are consistently delivering upon within our business development function.

Simply put, this work would not be possible without the talented people that make our company thrive, and who inspire us to foster a workplace that attracts and cultivates the brightest candidates from across the industry. COVID-19 has shown us just how flexible and agile our people are and it is these qualities that really set us apart as a company.

As part of our dedication to our employees, we will be launching our inaugural Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) report this month, showcasing our responsibility to our people, wider communities and the environment. For example, within this, we have outlined our commitment to proactively increasing diversity within our workforce through initiatives such as the ADVANZ Women’s Network (AWN) which we are proud to say is now expanding into India. We are also dedicated to reducing our carbon footprint with plans to convert our entire fleet to electric, and eliminate single-use plastic across our business hubs in the future.

Beyond this, our main focus is supplying medicines based on wider societal need, and as we continue to offer complex generic medicines, we are dedicated to playing our part in the delivery of essential cost savings, which allow healthcare systems to provide better care to patients. We also endeavour to place profit back into communities through donations and we’re proud to say that in 2020 we provided nearly 65,000 treatments to help support some of the world’s most vulnerable communities.

2021 has provided a firm foundation for the company’s growth and, in the next five years, the company has set an ambitious target of becoming the partner of choice when seeking to commercialise complex medicines in Europe. This will only be made possible through significant investment in the workforce, by working closely with one another and with our local communities, and by nurturing existing partnerships while, crucially, building new ones.

As I reflect on the team’s collective achievements, not just in the past year, but over the last decade, we’re in a very strong position to achieve our goals.