This week the industry watched an eleven-year run at the top of one of its bigger companies come to a close, with very little drama. The Long View is for the thing these quiet exits rarely get, a proper accounting: eleven years, one very large deal, and the question of whether it was worth it.
Christophe Weber stopped being the chief executive of Takeda. The change took a few minutes at the company's June 24 annual shareholders meeting, the kind of procedural moment that ends an era without looking like one. Julie Kim, who had been “unanimously chosen” by the board as CEO-elect earlier this year, took over. To make sense of the eleven years now behind Weber, you can skip most of the org charts and the earnings decks and start with a single transaction.
In January 2019, Takeda completed its purchase of Shire, valued at $62bn before existing debt, still the largest acquisition of a foreign company by any Japanese firm. Almost everything Weber will be remembered for runs through that deal: the global scale, the shift in the company's center of gravity toward the United States, the debt that turned shareholders against him, and the executive who has now replaced him.
The First Non-Japanese to Run Any Japanese Drugmaker
Weber was an unlikely choice, and not a universally welcome one. A French national with two decades at GSK behind him, he joined Takeda as chief operating officer in April 2014 and, a year later, on April 1, 2015, became the first non-Japanese person to run any Japanese pharmaceutical company, a business with 234 years of history behind it. The reception was not warm. He faced open opposition at shareholder meetings, in parts of the Japanese press, and from members of the founding Takeda family, and the company's own nomination committee had to clear him before he could take the role.
He was Hasegawa's bet. Yasuchika Hasegawa, the first non-family member to lead Takeda, had been searching since 2013 for someone who could turn a Japanese drugmaker into a global one, and concluded that the someone did not have to be Japanese. Weber was the answer to a question the company had set for itself, which is not the same thing as being wanted.
Asked why he would take a job that arrived with that much resistance, he pointed at the company itself, saying he "was really attracted by the history and strong reputation of the company." The history that drew him belonged, in part, to the same founding family that had tried to keep him out.