British drugmaker GSK will sell off the rest of its share in Haleon after slowly selling off multibillion-dollar pieces of its ownership in the consumer company.
The sale of the final 4.2% stake in Haleon, which was created in 2019 by merging Pfizer and GSK’s consumer health businesses, caps a string of sales since last year. When the company was spun off in 2022, GSK retained about 13% of Haleon’s shares, the pharma major said in a filing Thursday. But it sold chunks of its stake last May and in January.
GSK called the spinout its “most significant corporate change” in the last 20 years after turning down Unilever’s £50 billion ($68 billion) offer to purchase the business, which makes Sensodyne toothpaste and Advil, among other products.
In March, Pfizer also sold off a significant portion of its stake in Haleon, reducing its ownership from 32% to about 24%. In 2023, Pfizer said it would begin a “slow and methodical” exit from the company.
Pfizer and GSK are not alone among large pharma companies exiting their consumer businesses. J&J said Monday that it would sell its final, nearly 10% stake in the Tylenol and Listerine manufacturer Kenvue. Sanofi is also in the process of spinning out its own consumer unit.