AbbVie CEO Gonzalez Retires, COO to Take Helm of Botox Maker

Richard Gonzalez

(Bloomberg) — AbbVie Inc.’s Chief Executive Officer Richard A. Gonzalez will retire after a colorful tenure that included the multibillion takeover of Botox-maker Allergan as he raced to wean the company off of its reliance on blockbuster Humira.

Gonzalez became AbbVie’s first CEO when it spun out from Abbott Laboratories in 2013. He’s spent the past decade doing deals to help build the company up in a variety of areas like oncology, dermatology and more recently, neurology. AbbVie’s autoimmune-disease treatment Humira has long been one of the world’s best-selling medicines and Gonzalez has been finding new ways to keep the business growing after Humira lost exclusivity.

Starting in July, AbbVie’s Chief Operating Officer Robert A. Michael will step into CEO role, the company said in a statement Tuesday. Michael, who’s joining the board, previously worked as chief financial officer among other positions. Gonzalez will become executive chairman.

The leadership transition isn’t expected to alter AbbVie’s strategy after the company “deftly handled the impact of biosimilar Humira on the business” and began to address future growth concerns with recent deals, Barclays analysts said in a note Tuesday.

The shares were little changed at 12:05 p.m. in New York. The stock has gained 14% so far this year, outperforming a 6% gain in the S&P 500 Health Care Index.

Public Eye

Gonzalez, a rarity among CEOs for not having finished college, worked at Abbott for three decades before retiring in 2007 after a throat cancer diagnosis. That break only lasted about two years. Abbott’s longtime Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Miles White talked him into running the company’s venture portfolio, a conversation that eventually led to the spinning out of Abbott’s pharmaceutical business and the creation of AbbVie.

AbbVie’s success with anti-inflammatory drug Humira came with a downside: The company came under fire for its ample use of patents to extend the drug’s exclusivity. Gonzalez ended up testifying before Congress in February 2019, defending the use of intellectual property to protect Humira. A few months after the hearing, US senators proposed legislation that would help the Federal Trade Commission go after drug companies for so-called “patent thickets,” a term to describe the use of numerous patents to ward off competition.

All the while, Gonzalez was a driving force behind transformative deals to help AbbVie grow beyond Humira. The company tried and failed to do a $52 billion acquisition of Irish drugmaker Shire Plc, which would’ve allowed the company to move its address abroad to lower its tax rate. AbbVie had to scrap the deal in 2014 after the US announced changes to tax rules that made those types of deals less attractive.

But Gonzalez kept on going. In 2015, the company bought cancer drugmaker Pharmacyclics Inc. for $21 billion and four years later, it struck a $63 billion deal for Botox-maker Allergan Plc.

Gonzalez hasn’t shown signs of slowing down, despite fielding questions throughout the years about when he might retire. At the end of 2023, he did back-to-back deals buying ImmunoGen Inc. and Cerevel Therapeutics — two deals that were done within a span of a week — to continue building out AbbVie’s pipeline.

The $10.1 billion acquisition of ImmunoGen gives AbbVie a highly sought-after class of cancer treatments called antibody-drug conjugates. The $8.7 billion purchase of Cerevel will add potential treatments for schizophrenia, Parkinson’s and mood disorders “that may transform standards of care across psychiatric and neurological disorders,” AbbVie said in December.

(Updates shares and adds more information throughout.)

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