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  • 3 months ago
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00:00It was a company that J&J didn't have success with, so they spun it off.
00:04It didn't work as a spinoff, even with all of the activist investors circling around it.
00:08Why should its fate be any different with Kimberly-Clark?
00:12Yeah, that's a good question.
00:14I mean, this whole consumer health area is one where we've seen a huge amount of activity in recent years
00:18with a bunch of big pure play pharma companies like Johnson & Johnson getting out of this area.
00:25We've seen it also with companies like GSK, Pfizer, and others.
00:30All kind of moving to separate or sell or spin off their consumer health brands.
00:35So that's created a whole bunch of new players like Kenview and some others, Haley and over here,
00:40which are sort of floating around and people are looking for new partners to attract scale.
00:45And so that's where Kimberly-Clark comes in here.
00:47And they immediately then get to rival the biggest player in that sector in consumer space, which is P&G.
00:56So you get to form a big new player that immediately vaults ahead of some of its close rivals.
01:00So you've got more scale, which is key for these companies in an area that has a lot thinner margins
01:06than the traditional pharma business that they were attached to with Johnson & Johnson.
01:11It also begs the question, what's Kimberly-Clark's relationship with President Trump like?
01:18Because he has led a huge attack against Kenview's biggest product, right?
01:23Tylenol.
01:25Acetaminophen is, of course, the drug that's the main ingredient there.
01:30Do you think this company is going to have any plan to deal with the president better than Kenview did as a standalone?
01:37Well, that is a really good question.
01:39And as you say, this is something that's weighed on the share price for Kenview.
01:43Their sales have been falling, not entirely due to this,
01:46but it's definitely been under pressure from this attack, from the Trump administration,
01:52linking acetaminophen, Tylenol's active ingredient, to these claims of autism,
02:01which haven't been proven, of course.
02:05And so it is a really good question.
02:07How do they deal with that going forward?
02:08There's a real risk here in these kinds of deals when you take on that kind of a liability.
02:12So definitely an element of risk, yeah.
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