Pharmaceutical companies ditch their consumer healthcare arms

GSK and Pfizer are merging their consumer-healthcare businesses. GSK can now concentrate on its drugs pipeline. Alex Rankine reports.

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GSK faces two key clinical trials in 2019

Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) have finally done a deal, says Carol Ryan in The Wall Street Journal. "And it's a big one." The two pharma giants plan to combine their consumer healthcare businesses in a joint venture.

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Markets editor

Alex is an investment writer who has been contributing to MoneyWeek since 2015. He has been the magazine’s markets editor since 2019. 

Alex has a passion for demystifying the often arcane world of finance for a general readership. While financial media tends to focus compulsively on the latest trend, the best opportunities can lie forgotten elsewhere. 

He is especially interested in European equities – where his fluent French helps him to cover the continent’s largest bourse – and emerging markets, where his experience living in Beijing, and conversational Chinese, prove useful. 

Hailing from Leeds, he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford. He also holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Manchester.