Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc on Friday issued last year’s financial report that met an important deadline for creditors, revealing new details on a range of financial and legal issues and it also announced changes to its board.
Shares in Valeant closed at US$33.36 in New York trading on Friday and are well down from their all time high of US$263.70 in August last year.
The company has been facing scrutiny from the US Congress, prosecutors and regulators over its drug pricing, business practices and accounting practices.
Valeant’s relationship with Philidor RX Services, which has been distributing its drugs, was terminated last year, hurting Valeant sales.
The publication of the report satisfies demands from Valeant’s creditors, but also shows the difficult road ahead for the drugmaker, Wall Street analysts and investors said.
“We think investors should sell on this catalyst since the business is quite weak and faces a number of headwinds,” Mizuho Securities analyst Irina Koffler said in a research note.
The annual report does not answer some more basic questions about what strategy Valeant would adopt, said David Neuhauser, managing director of Livermore Partners, which is shorting Valeant.
“They continue to dig out of a very troubled situation that will take time,” Neuhauser said.
In the report, Valeant restated last year’s financial loss and 2014 earnings as it had forecast.
The report also revealed new details about the poor sales of its Addyi sexual dysfunction drug, financial details about its Xifaxin gastroenterology treatment and also disclosed possible inventory issues on its pharmaceuticals in Poland and Russia.
The company also revealed it is being investigated by the US Department of Justice in North Carolina. The regulators have requested material relating to the production, marketing, distribution, sale and pricing of three of its life-saving drugs, Valeant said.
Massachussetts and New York are also investigating similar issues.
In a separate statement, Valeant said that seven board members would not be standing for re-election at its June 14 shareholder meeting, including Howard Schiller, the company’s former chief financial officer and G. Mason Morfit, who represents ValueAct. Robert Ingram will remain, along with ValueAct representative Robert Hale.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by