RATING
Outlook
Positive
SECTOR
Drugs & Biotechnology
Chief Sustainability Officer
T: N/A
E-mail: N/A
Stock Exchange and Ticker
NYSE: NVS
Website
Contact
T: 41 61 324 11 11
E.mail: N/A
Listing
- World’s 25 Best Workplaces – Fortune
- #133 Best Employers for Diversity (2023)
- #281 America’s Best Large Employers (2023)
- #187 World’s Top Female-Friendly Companies (2022)
- #178 Mexico’s Best Employers (2022)
- #91 World’s Best Employers (2022)
- America’s Best Employers By State (2022)
- #264 Best Employers for Women (2022)
- #27 Best Employers for New Grads (2022)
- #68 Global 2000 (2022)
- #415 America’s Best Employers (2021)
Awards
- Medicine Index – Novartis ranked second in 2021
- Dow Jones Sustainability World Index
- Sustainalytics – Novartis leads in the pharmaceutical subindustry group
- Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index
- ISS ESG – B Score
- FTSE4Good
- Access to Machine Index
- MSCI – A rating
- S&P Global
Revenue
$50.54B
Market Capitalisation
$219.65B
Employees
104,323
Content source
- Forbes
- Yahoo Finance
- Awards and Recognition | Novartis
- Novartis in Society Integrated Report 2021
- Climate – Novartis – note the period for this document is January 2020 – December 2020
- Q4 2021 ESG Update for investors and analysts
- United Nations Global Compact Communication on Progress 2021
- Novartis Environmental Sustainability Strategy
Novartis Sustainability Report
Evaluation of Novartis
Sustainability Scorecard
Novartis Company Activity
Novartis AG is a holding company, which engages in the development, manufacture, and marketing of healthcare products. Novartis comprises several organizational units. The Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR) is the research arm of Novartis. NIBR focuses on discovering new drugs that can change the practice of medicine. The Global Drug Development (GDD) organization oversees the development of new medicines discovered by the company’s researchers and partners. Novartis Technical Operations (NTO) is responsible for making the innovative medicines, devices, and Sandoz products and delivering them to customers across the world. Novartis Business Services (NBS) now known as Customer & Technology Solutions (CTS) consolidates support services across the organization, helping drive innovation, efficiency, simplification, standardization, and quality. Other corporate functions support the enterprise in specific areas of expertise, including finance, human resources, legal, and communications. The company was founded on February 29, 1996, and is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland (Forbes and Climate-change-information-request-response)
Novartis Sustainability Activity - As per company declarations
Novartis reports on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) topics and claims these are integrated throughout their strategy. Topics cover access to medicines, global health challenges, environmental stability, and ethical business practices. The targets and progress are clearly specified and include metrics and examples of initiatives in support of their goals. Despite being involved in several scandals, the company does not provide any updates about how it has addressed the issues. Nonetheless, the Integrated Report for 2021 provides comprehensive information on the initiatives the company is taking to reach its sustainability goals. However, on the internet, none of these initiatives are being acknowledged or mentioned by other sources, which questions the credibility of the information in the report.
Certificate & Labels, Standards and Frameworks
- ISO 9001
- ISO 134855
- Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) certificates
- My Green Lab Certification
- GRI Content Index
- Sustainability Accounting Standards Board Index
- Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD)
Novartis in the news: Press Reviews and Social Media
The pharmaceutical company spent more than $100 million on lavish meals, fishing junkets, golf outings, sporting events, and speaker fees to influence doctors to prescribe its drugs.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said on Tuesday that some data from early testing of Novartis’ more than $2 million gene therapy Zolgensma was manipulated, but the agency believes the treatment should remain on the market. The manipulated data was used to illustrate comparability between an early version of Zolgensma and the later version of the treatment, which was manufactured using a different process. The FDA does not believe that the manipulation impacts the safety or testing surrounding the version of the drug
U.S. President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen testified that Swiss drugmaker Novartis AG initially wanted him to lobby for the company when it retained him with a $1.2 million contract, but that Cohen refused. “Novartis sent me their contract, which stated specifically that they wanted me to lobby. That they wanted me to provide access to government, including the president, ” Cohen said.
Novartis AG will cut as many as 8,000 jobs under a plan to save at least $1 billion by 2024 and boost the pharmaceutical giant’s performance. Chief Executive Officer Vas Narasimhan has been under pressure to convince shareholders he can improve the company’s performance. Some of the drugs that the company was counting on to drive growth have failed in clinical trials, run into safety issues, or been delayed.
Novartis’s sustainability-linked bond launched in late 2020 was a world first for the pharmaceutical industry. These involve increasing the availability of certain drugs in low-income and lower-middle-income countries, a concept known as access to medicines. Failure to achieve the targets triggers the payment of a penalty interest rate to bondholders. Critics point to a lack of transparency in the targets and their measurement, and question whether the bond will drive genuine improvements in access to medicines. These issues are fuelling concerns that Novartis’s SLB will become an exercise in ticking the boxes for ESG investment for the company, shareholders and bondholders.
Highlights from Novartis Sustainability Report
Achievements
- 21 Major approvals (US, EU, Japan, China) including two new molecular entity approvals from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
- 3 Breakthrough therapy designations from the FDA
- 78 Employee engagement score in Q4 (out of 100), 5 points higher than the industry benchmark
- –34% Greenhouse gas emissions reduced vs. 2016 baseline (Scope 1 and Scope 2)
- Transparent reporting
- 46% of Women in management
Weaknesses and Setbacks
- Lack of sufficient social goals
Targets vs Progress Reported
Target | Results reported |
---|---|
Become carbon neutral in own operations (Scope 1 and 2) by 2025 | - Greenhouse gas emissions (Scope 1 and 2) excluding offsets –34% vs. 2016 baseline |
Include environmental criteria in all supplier contracts by 2025 | - One Novartis site still using PVC for secondary and tertiary packaging but has plans in place to eliminate its use during 2022 |
Reduce waste disposal by half by 2025 | - Waste disposal –56% vs. 2016 baseline Eliminated 17 types of single-use plastics at 132 Novartis sites |
Reduce water consumption by half in our operations by 2025 | - Water consumption –40% vs. 2016 baseline |
Prevent any water quality impacts from manufacturing effluents | - 85%+ of Novartis manufacturing sites meet internal quality standards. Suppliers being trained on Novartis water quality standards |