Hudson's departure does not mean Sanofi lacked achievements during his tenure.

The company, once criticized as "conservatively French," was steered by Hudson away from the diabetes and cardiovascular fields and toward immunology and oncology. It was under his leadership that Dupixent became the world's third-best-selling drug, with annual sales reaching $14.1 billion. Furthermore, he orchestrated the divestment of control over the consumer health business, Opella, fundamentally transforming Sanofi into a pure-play prescription drug company.

Bloomberg Intelligence analysts acknowledged that Hudson significantly changed Sanofi's culture, elevated its global standing, and charted a profitable growth path for the company through to 2030.

However, the capital markets were not convinced.

During Hudson's six-year tenure, Sanofi's share price inched up by a mere 1%. In contrast, AstraZeneca's shares doubled over the same period, and Novartis' nearly did so as well. In 2025 alone, Sanofi's stock accumulated a 23% decline. Investors questioned the fact that the core patent for Dupixent is set to expire in 2031, with no clear "blockbuster" successor in sight.

In 2023, Hudson launched an ambitious "Push for Growth" plan, which saw the R&D budget surge by 20% within two years. Yet, 2025 concluded with three late-stage clinical programs delivering "mixed or even negative" results.

Among them, the experimental multiple sclerosis drug, tolebrutinib, failed a key Phase III trial, and the FDA rejected another indication due to liver injury risks. The atopic dermatitis candidate, amlitelimab, once touted as Dupixent's "natural successor," produced mixed clinical data.

During an earnings call in late January, Hudson showed rare signs of fatigue: "If you'd asked me in 2020 whether Sanofi needed five to seven years, I would have said no categorically. We were smarter, stronger, and would definitely be faster—unfortunately, it didn't turn out that way."

Sanofi's board clearly decided not to wait any longer.

Hudson's successor is Belen Garijo, 65, a Spaniard who previously spent 15 years at Sanofi, where she led the integration following the Genzyme acquisition. Over the past five years, she served as CEO of Merck KGaA, the German industrial giant spanning pharmaceuticals and semiconductors. During her tenure, Merck KGaA's share price fell by 14%—a performance even worse than Sanofi's under Hudson.

The market's first reaction was confusion. Investors questioned why a CEO who failed to drive growth in the pharmaceutical division during her tenure and lacks a distinguished R&D track record should be the one to solve Sanofi's most pressing problem: R&D efficiency.

However, Jefferies analysts proposed a different narrative framework. At Merck KGaA, the pharma division was never a top priority—under family control, the ownership structure and strategic focus long favored the life science tools business. "If anything, preventing further decline in the pharma business is already quite impressive," the analysts noted.

Sanofi Chairman Frederic Oudea's remarks revealed deeper considerations. He praised Garijo for having "an intimate understanding of the company's culture." The implication: Hudson never fully tamed the French company.

The relationship between the British-born Hudson and the French establishment had always been delicate.

In 2020, during the early stages of COVID, he suggested in an interview that "the US might get Sanofi's vaccine earlier than the rest of the world," drawing the ire of the Élysée Palace.

Then, in 2024, Hudson led the sale of a controlling stake in the consumer health unit Opella to a U.S. private equity firm. The French government intervened urgently, ultimately securing board seats and employment commitments. In April of the same year, he co-authored an op-ed in the Financial Times with Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan, criticizing Europe's drug pricing caps—a stance unlikely to win favor in France, where the healthcare system is state-funded.

This January, Sanofi withdrew from the French pharmaceutical industry association Leem, and Hudson himself was preparing to assume the chairmanship of the U.S. lobbying organization PhRMA in February.

A person familiar with the Sanofi board commented privately: "Hudson did everything right, except learn how to survive here." Garijo is different. When asked by the media if she speaks French, she replied with a single word: "Oui."

Jefferies analysts believe Sanofi's management adjustments may not be over. Garijo's real challenge is not cultural integration, but delivering tangible R&D pipeline results within two to three years.

Sanofi will hold its annual general meeting on April 29th, where Garijo's board appointment will be formally voted on. The company is also seeking approval to amend its articles of association, raising the CEO age limit from 65—an adjustment clearly tailored to the circumstances.

At 65, Garijo becomes Sanofi's first female CEO. But what awaits her is not a celebration; it is a predicament marked by a discounted market valuation, a pipeline caught between expired assets and unproven successors, and investors running out of patience.

If Sanofi's story revolves around R&D setbacks, then CSL's version of events is far more complex.

McKenzie's "retirement" came suddenly, sparking market speculation about whether the CEO "left voluntarily or was pushed out." At the subsequent results meeting, CSL Chairman McNamee was blunt: "He doesn't have the skills we're going to need going forward."

This blood products giant was once a legend in the Australian capital market. Starting from a government serum laboratory in Melbourne, CSL spent over three decades expanding through multiple acquisitions in Europe and the US, growing into the Australian company with the most global influence outside the mining sector.

McNamee himself, during his tenure as CEO in the 1990s, built CSL into one of the global leaders in plasma fractionation, with its market capitalization once exceeding 140 billion Australian dollars.

But times have changed. Over the past 18 months, CSL's share price has nearly halved.

The half-year report figures intensified the panic: net profit plummeted 81% to $401 million, with goodwill impairment reaching $1.1 billion, primarily related to the Vifor and Seqirus business units. Core plasma business CSL Behring saw revenue decline by 7%, dragging overall revenue down by 4%.

These problems did not arise overnight.

The biggest burden came from the nearly $12 billion acquisition in 2022—CSL's largest ever—when it acquired Swiss kidney disease drugmaker Vifor Pharma. At the time, the market broadly favored the strategic synergy of entering the iron deficiency and nephrology fields, but the integration results fell far short of expectations.

Prasad Patkar, Investment Director at Platypus Asset Management, stated the deal was "an absolute mess," but the ongoing strong performance of CSL's core business had masked the problems.

In 2015, CSL acquired Seqirus from Novartis for $275 million, which significantly boosted its vaccine business to the point of turning its fortunes around. The leader of this turnaround was Gordon Naylor, who has now stepped in temporarily to replace McKenzie.

Unfortunately, Seqirus's good times were also short-lived. In 2024, CSL was considering spinning it off independently but abruptly halted the plan in October—the reason being a sharp decline in U.S. influenza vaccination rates, which directly undermined the valuation basis. Since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became HHS Secretary in 2025, vaccination willingness in the U.S. has continued to decline.

CSL's plasma business faces two major headwinds: new Chinese regulations on albumin have dampened demand, and gene therapies are slowly but irreversibly eroding traditional markets like hemophilia.

Morningstar analysts wrote in a report that CSL's core problem is not a loss of competitiveness—it still has market share growth in immunoglobulins, improving gross margins quarter-on-quarter, and a stable oligopoly with Takeda and Grifols. Instead, it is a series of continuous failures in management expectations.

This view was echoed by Jun Bei Liu, founder of investment management firm Ten Cap.

In her view, despite management's constant assurances, CSL's financial performance has consistently deteriorated over the past year, and investor relations have been a mess. Even the timing of the announcement of McKenzie's departure was "chaotic": issued seconds before market close, leaving investors no time to react, with the stock opening 5% lower the next day.

As interim CEO, Naylor is now 68 years old, a 33-year veteran at CSL. In the 2000s, he served as the company's CFO and later took charge of Seqirus, successfully leading its turnaround. McNamee has set the interim CEO term for one year, while initiating a global search for a permanent CEO.

CSL maintained its full-year revenue guidance of 2% to 3% growth and expanded its share buyback program to $750 million. The problem is, the market no longer needs buybacks; it needs evidence.

Consider this: if a company renowned for its business predictability can't foresee its own CEO being abruptly ousted, why would investors readily believe a few slogans? For instance, a thoroughly disappointed Patkar revealed that his fund sold all of its CSL shares in 2025.

The two CEO changes at Sanofi and CSL, taking place continents apart, were juxtaposed by the timeline in February. Yet, if we pull the lens back, the public would also discover that these are just two facets of a dramatic restructuring of the global pharmaceutical industry's leadership landscape over the past year.

In the first quarter of 2025, Novo Nordisk's semaglutide saw blockbuster sales, surpassing Merck's Keytruda to claim the title of "top-selling drug." However, in May of the same year, CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen announced his departure.

External speculation suggested that the decision to step down for this 34-year company veteran was primarily due to Novo Nordisk's share price falling over 50% from its peak the previous year, erasing more than $400 billion in market value at one point. This was compounded by next-generation drug clinical trial results falling short of expectations and successive setbacks in the U.S. weight-loss drug market.

Subsequently, in August, Maziar Mike Doustdar, an internally grown leader but not a Dane, took the helm of this giant mired in a growth predicament.

In September, GSK also announced that nine-year CEO Emma Walmsley would be stepping down, with CBO Luke Miels officially taking over from January 2026.

Walmsley's departure came earlier than her contract expiration. Although she completed the spin-off of GSK's consumer health business Haleon and settled Zantac-related litigation, refocusing the company as a pure-play biopharmaceutical firm, the capital markets were not convinced: over her nine-year tenure, GSK's shares accumulated a decline of approximately 11%.

Investors couldn't ignore the fact that while peers were making breakthroughs in COVID vaccines and immuno-oncology, GSK's pipeline consistently lacked heavyweight successor assets.

Also confirmed in September was the new CEO for Merck KGaA: Kai Beckmann, promoted from his role as CEO of the company's Electronics business.

In terms of tenure, Beckmann is even more of a "veteran." He joined Merck KGaA in 1989 as an IT systems consultant. Four and a half years later, he was promoted to head of Corporate Systems and Data Center Management, subsequently holding positions including Head of IT Infrastructure, Head of Information Management & Consulting, and CIO.

The year 2017 marked a significant turning point for Beckmann. He became CEO of Merck's Performance Materials business, leading its comprehensive transformation into the Electronics business, establishing it as one of Merck's three pillars alongside Life Science and Healthcare. Since 2021, Beckmann served as CEO of Merck's Electronics business.

Over the past few decades, the standard profile for a CEO of a large pharmaceutical company has often been a "growth implementer": someone skilled in portfolio management, M&A integration, and shareholder returns.

Both Sanofi's Hudson and CSL's McKenzie belonged to this generation. They completed asset divestitures and strategic refocusing during their tenures. However, they both lost points on the unoutsourcable, core issue of "R&D output."

In contrast, the successors—Garijo and Naylor—represent the return of a different type of CEO: "culture restorers" with a deep understanding of their organization's DNA. The board believes Sanofi needs someone capable of navigating interactions with the government and various stakeholders, while CSL seeks a leader who can rebuild investor trust and clarify strategic priorities.

In 2026, a new wave of transformation in the pharmaceutical industry is intensifying.

The cash flow and dividends brought by COVID have been exhausted. What remains are the problems that were always there, merely hidden before: how to cross the patent cliff, how to improve R&D efficiency, where the company goes after its star product fades...

Different companies are offering different answers. Some choose to bring back familiar hands; others opt for cross-regional talent deployment. However, the underlying consensus is that CEO tenures are shortening, and board patience is wearing thin.

Sanofi did not give Hudson a seventh year. CSL did not let McKenzie complete his transformation. Giants like Novo Nordisk, GSK, and Merck KGaA are also urgently parting ways with their "old flames," searching for the next "new love" that can deliver growth.

For those still occupying the CEO chair, the signal is clear enough: When miracles are delayed, the board will no longer wait.