Botox faces its greatest challenge in the market to wipe the wrinkles off European foreheads when a Nestle SA-L’Oreal SA joint venture starts selling its own injectable skin treatment next month.
Azzalure, as the new product is known, will go on sale in the U.K. in “coming days,” said Francois Fournier, who heads L’Oreal and Nestle’s Galderma venture in Europe. France will follow, and Galderma aims to sell the treatment in all of Europe’s main markets by the end of 2009, he said in an interview at his Lausanne, Switzerland office last week.
Botox, made by Allergan Inc. from a purified form of a deadly poison, has had few challengers since the 1990s, when doctors started using it to treat wrinkles. Sales last year were $1.3 billion, and the drug controlled 83 percent of the global market for neurotoxins that paralyze certain muscles or nerves, aiming to give patients a more youthful appearance.
Ipsen SA, the French drugmaker that granted Galderma the distribution rights for Azzalure, wants a piece of the action, and on April 30 got approval for sale of the treatment in the U.S. under the brand Dysport.
Competition in the U.S. and Europe “combined is going to put a dent in Allergan’s market share,” said Peter Bye, an analyst at Jefferies Group Inc. with a “hold” rating on the U.S. company’s stock. Azzalure is “a bit more of a threat.” He said Botox may lose 4 percentage points of market share in 2009.
L’Oreal, the world’s biggest cosmetics maker, teamed up with Nestle, one of its biggest shareholders, to create Galderma as a prescription skin-treatment business in 1981. The world’s biggest food company has said Galderma joined Hot Pockets sandwiches and Buitoni pasta among 29 Nestle brands with revenue exceeding 1 billion Swiss francs ($880 million) last year.
Full Story: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601100&sid=aoETYzMjS.Zc&refer=germany
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