Pfizer Considers Spinning Off or Selling Consumer Health Unit

Pfizer Considers Spinning Off or Selling Consumer Health Unit
“Although there is a strong connection between consumer health care and elements of our core biopharmaceutical businesses, it is also distinct enough from our core business
that there is potential for its value to be more fully realized outside the company,” Ian Read, Pfizer’s chairman and chief executive, said in a news release.
The pharmaceutical giant Pfizer said on Tuesday that it had begun a strategic review of its consumer health care division
that could result in the unit, whose products include Advil, Centrum supplements and ChapStick, being spun off or sold.
The unit, which Pfizer said it could ultimately choose to keep, is one of the largest health care businesses
of its type, with sales worth $3.4 billion in 2016 — about 6 percent of the drugmaker’s overall revenue.
The attempted acquisition of Allergan — a $152 billion deal
that Pfizer pursued to lower its tax bill in the United States — was abandoned after the Obama administration introduced new rules that removed the tax benefits of such so-called corporate inversions.
The announcement on Tuesday came about a year after Pfizer said that, following an “extensive evaluation,” it had decided not to split what it calls its Innovative Health
and Essential Health divisions into separate publicly traded companies.