4322 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith started his City career the year before I was born. He is, I think, 157 years old. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at AstraZeneca.
Astra Zeneca (AZN) is not as other pharmaceutical companies are: or rather, it was not as other pharmaceuticals are! Until last year, Astra Zeneca was operating a singular business model in which it sought to reduce R&D costs by outsourcing much of it in collaborative deals with outside companies. That left it, in theory at least, to simply generate cash with which to pay shareholders dividends or buy back their shares. The City did not buy that model and the shares sunk to a level where the yield was phenomenal. Change was needed and now, under new management, it is returning to being a more orthodox ‘big pharma’ which by convention, does a significant quantity of its molecule discovery, research and development in house – incurring the costs of such activity.
