BLOG: The prodigal son returns: Brent Saunders named chairman, CEO of B+L
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No need for an alarm clock on Feb. 15, at least in my house. My phone started blowing up around 0600 with the news: The prodigal son is back. Brent Saunders has returned to run Bausch + Lomb.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Brent, allow me to give you his career highlights from the last 15 years or so. After starting his career as a big-time business consultant, he was hired by the private equity company Warburg Pincus to run B+L after WP took the venerable company private in the late 2000s. Saunders led B+L from 2010 to 2013. His tenure ended with the sale of the company to Valeant as Michael Pearson took over a larger company now known as Bausch Health.
Image: Adobe Stock
We don’t talk about the Valeant years in polite company.
Anyone watching Saunders’ next chapter got a master class in corporate strategy. As CEO of Forest Laboratories, a smallish pharmaceutical company, he engineered a merger with Actavis. The combined company then acquired Allergan back in the days when Allergan was, well, Allergan. It was during this time that the whole Restasis patent issue became a thing and gave one of the best gifts to business opinion writers in history. To avoid a court case at the federal level regarding the patent, Allergan transferred the patent to a Native American tribe, a sovereign nation and therefore outside of the court’s jurisdiction.
Equal parts sheer brilliance and gall, I still love everything about that story!
Folks with memories of the 20teens will recall it as an era of “big deals.” Mergers, acquisitions, IPOs and all kinds of exotic business stuff was above the fold on the daily. Our guy Brent was in the thick of all that as chairman and CEO of Allergan. There were rumors of a tie-up with Pfizer, among others, but in the end he was the driving force behind the sale of Allergan to AbbVie. With the close of that transaction in May 2020, Brent Saunders was in the wind, gainfully unemployed and living the life of a successful consultant and investor.
Until this week when Brent Saunders, the prodigal son, came “home”!
What does this mean for B+L? For that matter, what does it mean for you and me? What might we expect from Brent Saunders, B+L CEO v2.0? In all candor, I don’t really know Brent in any real sense — I mean, not like I know my new bestie Mark Cuban, so what comes next is my thoughts after chatting with about a dozen folks who also had their phones blow up today. B+L is like the proverbial rock at the top of the hill: lots of potential energy. With a few well-targeted acquisitions, Saunders and his team could dramatically ramp up sales in both pharma and surgical while also adding to the pipelines of both. Expect some of this activity in the very short term.
Knowing his track record, I doubt this is all we can expect, though. This is a guy who has reached for, and successfully grabbed, the brass ring on every merry-go-round he’s been on. As I write this, B+L has a market valuation of approximately $6.5 billion. To compare, Alcon is sitting around $36 billion. Brent Saunders is not a small move guy, at least historically. He has built and run much bigger companies than B+L. I just don’t see him being content with slow and steady growth. My prediction? That next “big thing,” the major deal(s) that shakes up eye care? It comes from the newly independent B+L, helmed by Brent Saunders.
It looks like you can go home again, at least if you are Brent Saunders and home is B+L.
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