The R&D World Index (RDWI) for the week ending December 15, 2023, closed at 3,075.14 for the 25 companies in the RDWI. The Index was down -0.85% (or -26.28 basis points). Seventeen RDWI members gained value last week from 0.17% (IBM) to 9.17% (Ford Motor) Eight RDWI members lost value last week from -0.94% (Microsoft) to -9.06% (Oracle).
RDW Index member Pfizer, New York City, announced last week that it had fully completed the $43 billion acquisition of cancer drugmaker Seagen, Bothell, Washington. To win over the regulations imposed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and ensure a timely acquisition, Pfizer agreed to forego rights to royalties from U.S. sales of its cancer therapy Bavencio. The addition of Seagen doubles Pfizer’s oncology pipeline to 60 programs across multiple drug classes. During the coronavirus pandemic, Pfizer reaped the financial benefits of its vaccine treatment. But as the world heads toward a post-pandemic world, demand for these blockbusters is declining. As a result, Pfizer’s falling earnings and product revenue have created a growth crisis that falls short of analysts’ expectations and forced the company to make deeper cost cuts than they initially planned earlier in the Fall of 2023. Pfizer announced last week an additional $500 million in cost cuts to reach cost savings of $4 billion. The Seagen acquisition creates strong financing costs but with about $3.1 billion in added revenue. Overall, analysts see a strong long-term picture for Pfizer once they clear the current financial blip.
Nokia, Espoo, Finland, announced last week that it was moving its Nokia Bell Labs R&D campus in Murray Hill, New Jersey by 2028 to a new state-of-the-art R&D facility in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The Murray Hill facility began as the Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1925 with numerous innovations and Nobel Prizes created by researchers there.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee and Caterpillar, Irving, Texas, announced the creation of a cooperative R&D agreement (CRADA) last week to investigate marine methanol-fueled four-stroke engines. Research will be conducted over the next few years on a Caterpillar in-line six-cylinder marine four-stroke engine that has been modified for methanol use and installed at DOE’s National Transportation Research Center at ORNL. The project supports the DOE’s Vehicle Technologies Office’s focus on reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from off-road and marine vehicles.
RDW Index member AstraZeneca, Cambridge, United Kingdom, announced last week that it would acquire Icosavax, Seattle, for about $1.1 billion in a deal that expands the company’s late-stage pipeline for vaccines and immune therapies. Icosavax has a protein virus-like particle platform technology used to develop vaccines against infectious diseases. Icosavax’s initial focus is on life-threatening respiratory diseases and pan-respiratory diseases. The acquisition is expected to close in Q1 2024.
RDW Index member Microsoft, Redmond, Washington, announced last week that it is examining support of nuclear power for its future AI and supercomputing needs. The company is experimenting with generative AI to see if it could help streamline the complex and time-consuming nuclear regulatory approval process. For the past six months, a team of Microsoft researchers has been training a large language model with U.S. nuclear regulatory and licensing documents, looking to expedite the paperwork required for such approvals, which can take years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Nissan, Yokohama, Japan, announced last week that it is setting up a joint R&D center with Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2024 which will focus on electric vehicles (EVs), including its charging infrastructure and battery recycling. The company said it would sell China-developed EVs globally along with its line-up of existing internal combustion engine vehicles and plug-in hybrid vehicles. Nissan joins other foreign brands including Tesla, BMW, and Ford Motor that are expanding their exports of China-developed and manufactured cars which exploit China’s lower manufacturing costs and increase the capacity utilization of their factories. The launch of the joint research center is an extension of joint research efforts the company has had with Tsinghua University since 2016 that focused on intelligent mobility and autonomous driving technologies.
News publisher Axel Springer, Berlin, Germany, has signed a multiyear licensing deal with ChatGPT creator OpenAI, San Francisco. Under the agreement, OpenAI will pay to use content from Axel Springer publications, which include Politico and Business Insider in the U.S. and Bild and Welt in Europe to populate answers in ChatGPT and to train its AI tools. When ChatGPT uses data from Axel Springer publications to answer the user’s inquiry, the answer will include links to the sources of the data. This new format is scheduled to become active in early 2024.
RDW Index member Apple, Cupertino, California, rolled out a new security setting for its iPhones last week following a report of a vulnerability that allowed thieves to break into iPhone users’ devices. The vulnerability included thefts of iPhone owners’ passcodes to change their Apple accounts, access saved passwords, steal money, and lock users out of their iCloud-stored photos and videos. Thieves in New York City, Chicago, New Orleans, Minneapolis, and other cities watch users tap in their passcodes before stealing the devices. When Apple releases Stolen Device Protection, it plans to prompt users to turn it on. The setting can be found under Face ID & Passcode.
The U.S. Department of Labor announced last week that inflation rose a seasonally adjusted 0.1% in November from October. This puts inflation at 3.1% above their year-earlier level. Overall inflation topped out at 9.1% in June 2022. Economic analysts state that there is evidence that cooler inflation readings could be coming in the months ahead. Prices for a lot of goods have been falling which reflects how the unwinding of supply chain issues.
R&D World’s R&D Index is a weekly stock market summary of the top international companies involved in R&D. The top 25 industrial R&D spenders in 2020 were selected based on the latest listings from Schonfeld & Associates’ June 2020 R&D Ratios & Budgets. These 25 companies include pharmaceutical (10 companies), automotive (6 companies), and ICT (9 companies) which invested a cumulative total of nearly 260 billion dollars in R&D in 2019, or approximately 10% of all the R&D spending in the world by government, industries and academia combined, according to R&D World’s 2021 Global R&D Funding Forecast. The stock prices used in the R&D World Index are tabulated from NASDAQ, NYSE, and OTC common stock prices for the companies selected at the close of stock trading business on the Friday preceding the online publication of the R&D World Index
