Pfizer Considers Spinning Off or Selling Consumer Health Unit<br />“Although there is a strong connection between consumer health care and elements of our core biopharmaceutical businesses, it is also distinct enough from our core business<br />that there is potential for its value to be more fully realized outside the company,” Ian Read, Pfizer’s chairman and chief executive, said in a news release.<br />The pharmaceutical giant Pfizer said on Tuesday that it had begun a strategic review of its consumer health care division<br />that could result in the unit, whose products include Advil, Centrum supplements and ChapStick, being spun off or sold.<br />The unit, which Pfizer said it could ultimately choose to keep, is one of the largest health care businesses<br />of its type, with sales worth $3.4 billion in 2016 — about 6 percent of the drugmaker’s overall revenue.<br />The attempted acquisition of Allergan — a $152 billion deal<br />that Pfizer pursued to lower its tax bill in the United States — was abandoned after the Obama administration introduced new rules that removed the tax benefits of such so-called corporate inversions.<br />The announcement on Tuesday came about a year after Pfizer said that, following an “extensive evaluation,” it had decided not to split what it calls its Innovative Health<br />and Essential Health divisions into separate publicly traded companies.
