Does Roche Really Pose a Threat to Genentechs Culture?
This article from the San Jose Mercury News has gotten a lot of attention for its take on the Roche (RHHBY.PK)-Genentech (DNA) struggle. The reporter, Steve Johnson, is asking if all the concerns about Genentech’s fate are overdone. It’s true that the precious-unique-culture stuff can be overemphasized. Roche has indeed been insisting that they want to preserve Genentech’s entrepreneurial spirit (although, to be honest, they’d say that no matter what they were really thinking. What are they going to do, say that they really just want all the Avastin revenue and whatever else is high up in the pipeline?). And, as the article correctly points out, there have been any number of good-sized biotech outfits taken over by Big Pharma over the years. But what worries me a bit is what’s happened to some of those biotechs. It really is rare, from what I can see, for a company’s culture to stay the same after something like this happens. It’s a bit like those singers who make it big from obscurity
