Swiss drugmaker Novartis AG has financial firepower for acquisitions even with net debt of US$26 billion, though the COVID-19 pandemic has made it more difficult to value takeover candidates, Chief Executive Vas Narasimhan said in an interview.
"We generate a high free cash flow that allows us to not only finance our dividend but to direct capital to other purposes," Narasimhan told the Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung.Still,"acquisitions have slowed recently from a structural perspective" during the pandemic, he said. Moreover, he said Novartis had hoped to be faster in developing new drugs against COVID-19 and could have potentially profited from more cooperation with smaller biotech companies."We concentrated more on our own in-house activities - and learned a lesson from it," he said.