Thermo Fisher CEO: ‘Society broadly embraces the breakthroughs’

{"text":[[{"start":7.92,"text":"As a wave of Americans tested positive for Covid-19 in spring 2020, Thermo Fisher Scientific chief executive Marc Casper appeared alongside President Donald Trump outside the White House to provide reassurance that more tests were on the way."}],[{"start":22.16,"text":"Weeks earlier, Casper had received a call out of the blue from then vice-president Mike Pence. “They’d called one of our large customers and the customer said, ‘You have to call Thermo Fisher.’”"}],[{"start":33.36,"text":"The pandemic thrust the US biotechnology company on to the world stage. Thermo Fisher, which from a sleepy Boston suburb equips the life sciences sector with everything from lab tools and clinical tests to the knowhow to formulate drugs and run trials, produced more than 1bn PCR testing kits during the pandemic. In a normal year, it would sell tens of thousands."}],[{"start":55.969,"text":"For Casper, addressing the White House press corps was the culmination of a decades-long effort to build the company into a critical supplier to almost every corner of the life sciences sector."}],[{"start":66.681,"text":"“What allowed us to do what we did and step up during the pandemic was the culture of the organisation,” he says."}],[{"start":72.91,"text":"During his 17 years as chief executive, Casper has more than quadrupled Thermo Fisher’s revenues to $44.6bn last year, in large part by striking deals aimed at finding new products and services to sell to its customer base of drugmakers, laboratories and hospitals. Since his appointment, the company has spent more than $75bn on deals, Casper told investors this year."}],[{"start":95.988,"text":"Thermo Fisher now plays an important role in bringing many of the biggest scientific innovations to patients: it fills injector pens containing GLP-1 weight-loss drugs that are combating the obesity epidemic and it oversees clinical trials for novel Alzheimer’s medicines that could yield a better treatment for the debilitating memory-loss condition."}],[{"start":114.88,"text":"The biotech boom visible not far from Thermo Fisher’s offices is bringing a flood of private funding into the biopharmaceutical sector. But the company must also grapple with the Trump administration’s cuts to biomedical research funding and promotion of an anti-science agenda pursued by health officials such as Robert F Kennedy Jr, a vocal vaccine sceptic. In March, Casper gave Trump a tour of a manufacturing facility in Ohio."}],[{"start":141.68,"text":"“In the life sciences industry, for obvious reasons, there’s lots of questions about macro effects on these businesses: regulatory issues, [National Institutes of Health] funding cuts, the arrival of AI, the geopolitics with China,” says Scott Sperling, co-chief executive of Boston-based buyout group THL Partners, who has served on Thermo Fisher’s board for two decades. “When you have a CEO like Marc, he just puts his head down and the goal is to perform through whatever stock market environment may exist.”"}],[{"start":170.577,"text":"Casper has propelled Thermo Fisher from a market capitalisation of below $20bn when he took the job to a dominant player with a value of $227bn that exceeds rivals Abbott Laboratories and Danaher. But growth has slowed since the end of the pandemic, with its share price up by only 8 per cent over the past five years, compared with a 70 per cent rise in the wider S&P 500 index."}],[{"start":195.005,"text":"Revenues increased by just 1 per cent in the first quarter of this year on an organic basis, weighed down by weak demand from government agencies and academia in the US and China, but growth recovered to 5 per cent in the second quarter. Casper stresses that Congress continues to be “very supportive of scientific funding”."}],[{"start":214.407,"text":"“When your child is unwell, this is the most pro-science era ever and I think there’s philosophical things about trust that go on always in the background, but society broadly embraces the breakthroughs,” he says."}],[{"start":226.4,"text":"Thermo Fisher is in effect a vast corporate roll-up but Casper is acutely aware of the risks of a bad deal. “If you want to build a company over the long term, and M&A is a part of that strategy . . . the key is you can’t do bad transactions . . . because you lose all your shareholder goodwill.”"}],[{"start":241.52,"text":"A key test of a good acquisition for Casper is customers being “intellectually curious” about the logic, rather than asking: “Why did we do that?”"}],[{"start":252.28,"text":"“This is an industry . . . where the customer base is very loyal to good performance, so if you did a good job, they would be inclined to buy multiple product lines.”"}],[{"start":259.391,"text":"He says much of the skill of dealmaking is bringing a new company into the fold. “It’s all about the hearts and minds of the acquired company . . . it starts with the same thing I say on the day one town hall . . . which is: the day you joined Clario, our most recent acquisition, or the day you joined Life Technologies, that was the day you joined Thermo Fisher Scientific. We want to learn from all your years of experience.”"}],[{"start":284.72,"text":"For Sperling, Casper is equally able to address problems “from 70,000 feet as he is at 70 microns”. “There’s a significant breadth to Thermo Fisher’s portfolio and these are very technologically complex businesses,” says Sperling, adding that Casper is able to “grasp the intricacies of all those businesses”."}],[{"start":300.88,"text":"Casper started his career at Boston-based Bain & Company before moving to private equity group Bain Capital. He then rose to become chief executive of Kendro Laboratory Products, before joining Thermo Fisher’s predecessor Thermo Electron in 2001. Kendro was eventually sold to Thermo Electron a few years later."}],[{"start":322.34,"text":"The company’s long list of deals started with the 2006 merger that combined Thermo Electron and Fisher Scientific to create the modern-day Thermo Fisher. Three years later, Casper was promoted to the top job at 41."}],[{"start":334.24,"text":"Thermo Fisher’s $13.6bn acquisition of Life Technologies in 2014 bolstered its PCR testing capabilities. Through the $7.2bn takeover of Patheon, it became a drug manufacturing outsourcer, and its $17.4bn deal for PPD gave it expertise in running clinical trials on behalf of drugmakers."}],[{"start":356.999,"text":"Casper is accustomed to dealing with the ups and downs of supplying a cyclical sector such as the biotech industry, where valuations and investor interest wax and wane with each scientific discovery. The sector “got supercharged on the upside in an incredible way during the beginning of the pandemic and therefore the trough that followed felt much deeper”, says Casper. “Right now, we’re in a really strong upswing.”"}],[{"start":381.621,"text":"The chief executive continues to hunt for new deals but stresses that “we don’t look at the calendar and think we need to do something”. “There are times when scale is viewed more favourably by investors, and less so. We’re definitely in a time when it’s more so.”"}],[{"start":396.324,"text":"Casper, a native of Queens, New York, does not fit the mould of a swashbuckling, empire-building chief executive. Quiet and studied, his father served in the military and his mother worked for an insurance company."}],[{"start":408.4,"text":"“My mother reminded me that we were born with two ears and one mouth, usually when she was angry,” says Casper. “It’s insightful because so much of how we approach business is we listen. We listen to our customers and take it all in.”"}],[{"start":421.28,"text":"In a world where the churn of top executives is speeding up, Casper stands out as a counterpoint as he nears two decades in the job with no sign of slowing down. His best piece of advice for other chief executives: “Do what you say you’re going to do. Your word is all you have.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":441.99,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1789181913_9251.mp3"}