At the beginning of each year, most people reflect on what they had accomplished over the previous twelve months and consider whether they met their own personal goals and expectations. Though most of us do this routinely – usually during the aftermath of New Year’s Eve – we often forget that organizations need to do the same.
In his remarks to analysts today to discuss the fourth quarter 2009 earnings, Chairman and CEO Bill Weldon took a look back at what was said back in 2008 and then to see what the company has accomplished. So what exactly were those accomplishments?
You can listen to a replay of the earnings call – including Bill’s remarks – but I thought it would be of interest to share what he covered for those checking out JNJBTW. During the call today, Bill said the following:
"When we met with this group in January 2008, we looked ahead at the business challenges we would see over the next two years, we spoke about building our foundation of growth and we discussed many of the steps we were taking to do that:
We were in the midst of completing a restructuring of our Pharmaceuticals and Cordis businesses to deal with significant patent expirations and competitive pressures. Those restructurings were completed.
We were completing the integration of the Pfizer Consumer Healthcare business with our Consumer and OTC businesses, and looking ahead to further developing iconic brands like Listerine and Zyrtec. These integrated Consumer businesses are seeing solid performance.
We were continuing to make investments in emerging markets, including the traditional BRIC markets – Brazil, Russia, India and China, as well as other fast-growing developing markets like Mexico and Turkey.
We continued to advance our pipeline of pharmaceutical and medical device products, with many of those we highlighted now in the market or nearing approval.
We continued to identify white spaces in health care, investing in two acquisitions as cornerstones to a new Wellness and Prevention business.
Beyond that, we’ve made 8 major acquisitions since the beginning of 2008 and invested in several strategic licensing or collaboration agreements over that same period. These deals are complementary to our internal pipelines and bring us new capabilities or access to new growth platforms. “