The active pharmaceutical ingredients business being carved out by Sanofi will be called EUROAPI, the French drugmaker said on Tuesday, confirming it would decide whether to list the business by next year.
Karl Rotthier, a former chief executive at Dutch company Centrient Pharmaceuticals, will be CEO of EUROAPI, effective from Jan. 18, Sanofi added.
The company signalled last February it intended to carve out its active pharmaceutical ingredients business, which provides biologically active components for drugs, saying the business would be based on six production sites in Italy, Germany, Britain, France and Hungary.
Europe's pharmaceutical sector is highly reliant on raw materials and active ingredients from Asia, buying products from companies mostly based in China and India - a dependency exposed by some supply disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sanofi said it expected the new company, which will be based in France and have 3,200 staff, to have sales of around 1 billion euros ($1.2 billion) by 2022.
The global active pharmaceutical ingredient market was valued at $171 billion in 2019 and was forecast to grow almost by 7% a year up to 2027, according to a report published by research firm Grand View Research in February last year.
(Reporting by Matthias Blamont. Editing by Dominique Vidalon and Mark Potter)
