Is Valeant putting is new B&L acquisition on a course to take on Alcon? You read through all the B&L and Valeant threads, and the take seems to be that under this new ownership, B&L is not going to receive the support and funding necessary to keep on the cutting edge of technology to at least be a nuisance to Alcon. B&L has struggled for years - developing and researching and almost launching - but then getting strangled by their centralized, silos of Regulatory and Quality that as I understand to this day still plagues even the best project managers and doubles or triples the timeline. Seems to me if Valeant is going to defund R&D, they should follow suit and slash the rank and file of Regulatory and Quality since there won't be any new product lines in the works for these groups to prevent from making it to market.
Based on what? IOLs? Disposables? Their new laser machine that has be come a door stop? Tell me another one.
I work with Alcon... they have hired a large number of B&L's top people in R&D and if you look at the money Novartis is pumping into Alcon's R&D budget (billions over the last 2 years)... compared to the money Valeant is cutting from B&L's R&D budget, we don't consider B&L anything more than a shell of its former self. Kind of sad even from a competitors point of view.
B&L Surgical is a joke, there is no funded R&D whatsoever and not enough people left to even keep the products they have on the market. VRX has utterly, utterly ruined the business.
Surgical is a looser and has been for years. Surprised it isn't gone already. Not much bang for the buck spent. Surgical employee were a bunch of prima donnas who did nothing but whine!
That is mostly just U.S. surgical who spend their time whining instead of placing product. They always have an excuse why they can't sell anything. Meanwhile, Europe and Asia surgical are having a phenomenal 2014. Those regions don't make excuses, they make sales.
