Abstract
Sanofi-Aventis was created in August 2004, following the French company Sanofi-Synthélabo's acquisition of Aventis. The new pharmaceutical group,Sanofi-Aventis, is specialized in seven therapeutic areas: cardiovascular, thrombosis, metabolic disorders, oncology, central nervous system, internal medicine and vaccines.
This takeover has been supervised and controlled by the French government, which wanted to create an important pharmaceutical group in France. This guardianship has been very useful because another German group, Novartis, wanted to buy Aventis as well. Nowadays, Sanofi-Aventis is one of the most important pharmaceutical groups on earth. Its story is really fascinating. It is now the leading pharmaceutical group in Europe, and the third in the world, just behind Pfizer and GSK.
What is amazing in this takeover is that Sanofi-Synthélabo, which was smaller than Aventis, was able to take over the control of Aventis. Now, the group employs around 100,000 people worldwide, its turnover is around 25 Billion Euro and its headquarters is in Paris. In this paper, I will analyze this change. I am going to describe the two companies, with description of the activity of Sanofi-Aventis, explain all the changes that the takeover created and how the group faced them. I will conclude by examining if this change has been successful or not.
