PW 3 year MDX report card

Falling revenue, Delayed projects & Deteriorating morale.

Bizarre appointments.

Weak leaders in key positions.

PW - wrong person for job.

Not her fault though: Immelt should be accountable for ill advised acquisition and then thinking MDX could be run like train manufacturing.

Sir Bill played it very cleverly. Sir Bill wanted a big gullible corporation to acquire Amersham and secure his legacy. JA knows the story as he is a confidante of his.

 

Sir Bill and other top Amersham management took the loot.

The rest of us have or will get the boot, unless they have become disciples of the GE "train manufacturing" concept.

GE got snookered in the acquisition, buying a company that had old products and nothing new coming down the line (except for some sort of contraption that could produce FDG at site, but that wasn't going to be a blockbuster). But GE deserved to get screwed.

The many people who worked hard for years building customers and business for Winthrop, Nycomed, and Amersham are all being shoved out the door. I got shoved out several years back and whenever I run into an old customer, they tell me that they've switched their business to a competitor because they didn't get the service from GE that they were used to when I covered their accounts.

 

MDX is gonna get the rep for the place where GE wants to park execs that they would rather leave the organization without bothering to fire them.

 

Sir Bill was still pulling the strings until his retirement in May!

PW had to hire RP because of Sir Bill and Mike H! Immediately, knew he was completely out of his depth - it takes one to know one - but couldn't jettison him until Sir Bill retired!

 

When the rot set in at Mdx

I'm a former employee of MDx and follow the occasional posts on here out of morbid curiosity.

To my mind there were at least three contributing events to the state that this division finds itself in today:

1. Lack of long term planning: This has been referred to in many other posts, but specifically I recall a time just when Amersham had been acquired, when they were looking at the 10 year forecasts, which included Visipaque and various pipeline product early revenues. It was clear then that you had to be wildly optimistic about the success rate of R&D (any biotech R&D, not just the shambolic organization run by BC then DB) to include the majority of development projects as revenue earners. To the new GE owners, this was new territory and they did not question that first S1 submission from Mdx. Also there was an assumption that the fantastic and out-of-trend growth of contrast media would continue. Finally there was no consideration of life cycle management and how developing competitive claims would maintain this growth. Subsequently the forecasts for Visipaque were underpinned by lifecycle plans that were never funded or delivered. What a house of cards! When the forecasts showed a dip in division revenues before new products took over (in the later part of the 10 year plan) JH and colleagues chose to ignore the 10 year timeframe and just take a 3 year standard S1 snapshot... amazing ignorance of how pharma product life cycles and investment plans work. This willingness on the part of the legacy Amersham leadership to accept the short-termism of their GE overlords was sort of understandable given how little their new owners new about pharma. Myoview's patent expiration, a perfectly predictable event, still managed to come as a surprise to DP's replacement, JC (more of him later!)

2. Calamitous disaster management: When safety issues relating to Omniscan first appeared, the leading KOL who raised the concerns, based in Scandinavia, was largely ignored. Only when the firestorm built (possibly as a result of said KOL being tended by local management and feeling ignored) did DP and others start to realize what kind of issue was brewing. Right throughout the Omniscan crisis, MDx personnel were chasing the fire. Meanwhile a double digit percentage of revenue had gone and the reputation of the division among MR imaging customers took a beating, never mind the potentially awful human cost for the small number of patients who suffered.

3. R&D mismanagement: Amersham's R&D effort was always a little strange. Massively overstaffed at the time of the acquisition, at least there was an attempt to align R&D spend with commercial opportunity. However, continued delays, poor project management and fickle judgement meant that every time there was a portfolio review, there was always some f__kup to hide and a culture of sandbagging ensued. Then came the utterly reprehensible deceitful cronyism of the DB era. Even portfolio reviews were abandoned and financial accountability disappeared. What was striking was that all the tough love JC showed in rooting out costs and improving infrastructure and operations counted for little while 10% of his revenue was being pissed down the drain by DB. And JC never did a damn thing about it. Consequently Mdx has not launched one new product in over ten years (unless you count Datscan, a product approved over 10 years ago in Europe and only just approved in the US last year) and now secures the bulk of its profit from a market commoditized by the loss of patent of several brands with little market growth in prospect.

So this is a longwinded summary of at least three things that I suggest would account for the state of that business today. What on earth PW could have done about this I don't know. Rigor Mortis was setting in as she took over the reins. I genuinely don't believe BC thought that this would happen and would not see him as having sought to "get out while the going was good" It just happened that way.

 

Sir Bill knew that he and the company had been ridiculously lucky to be so successful - and that the likelihood it would continue was slim. He had admitted to his confidantes that the strategy was to get acquired by a big gullible corporation and his seduction of Immelt was flawless.

Since then there have been buffoons in charge - masters at impressing their even more inept and insecure bosses - with incomprehensible 4-blockers, relentless blaming of juniors + evasion and outsourcing of responsibility.

 

A reorg is indicated because none of the emperor's are attired:

JD should go back to trains.
PW should be in charge of a widget factory.
GB should be a government bureaucrat.
MM should be a cosmetics salesperson.
JA should be a waiter or barman in a golf club.
YD should be managing the restaurant in the golf club.

No reorg and the MDX trajectory of doom will continue to accelerate.

 

YD as CMO?

Knows nothing about oncology or neuroscience or diagnostics and hasn't shown any evidence that he wants to learn anything about them.

No interest in reading any development documents.

Naked ambition for a big job - hi my name is Richard P*****r!

Got found out at Genentech and Roche but they actually have competent leadership unlike GE.

 

There's a rumor flying around that Lantheus Medical Imaging (which was DuPont and BMS) is considering buying the GE radiopharmacy business. LMI seems to be in pretty bad shape -- and looks to be losing their supplier for most of their products (including Definity, which may be out of stock within a month).

Any news from the GE side?

 

In other words, Sir Bill took the money and ran. I knew that six years ago.

 

Is there anyway we could get Don Black back - he had his issues but he was very bright and had experience. YD contributes so little it seems like he didn't go to medical school. He hires people and then fires them - Don never stooped that low. In fact, YDs only accomplishment is firing and alienating people: except PW and JD - which tells you all you need to know about their handle on things.

 

I am lmfao reading this blog. YD is probably the single most incompetent leader I have ever worked for and yet GB lee shim and then promotes him. So much for my hope that GB could cut through the smoke and mirrors of the R&D exec team. Now AP will be leading the charges. Give me a break. She doesn't even have clinical development experience. Never did a submission in her career. It is now complete insanity in NPD and the end is near.

 

Problem is at the top Immelt wanted Amersham and was outsmarted by smooth used car salesman Sir Bill.

JD has no clue but liked the pompous, confident BS approach of YD and didn't know enough to figure out he's an inexperienced idiot.

PW likes YD because JD does - even though she must be aware of his succession of errors.

GB is in a tough job - has no idea what needs to be done so he has to do what he thinks will keep PW and JD happy and that means supporting YD and the even more incompetent and adored MM.

 

Probably true. I remember at one of the first national meetings after GE bought Amersham, Sir Bill showed up and told how he (played) coy with Immelt and acted like he wanted to remain independent (although GE and Amersham already had one joint venture in FDG). He talked about how Immelt got ahold of him on some golf course in California and "talked" him into letting GE buy Amersham.

As as aside, in British business terms (as Amersham was a British-owned company and under British stock laws), the buyout plan was called the "scheme." Never a truer term was used, IMHO.

 

A case study in corporate mayhem with the lunatics in charge.

Do PW, GB, JA, YD & MM have any awareness how ridiculously incompetent they appear?

The townhalls are excruciating - worse than the worst visit to the dentist!