Company Overview
Highlights
The world’s largest manufacturer of health care products.
Sales have increased each year for 73 consecutive years.
Named to Fortune’s 2007 "Most Admired Companies" list.
Joseph Scodari, Worldwide Chairman of J&J Pharmaceuticals, retired in early 2008 and Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors Christine Poon assumed direct responsibility.
More than 120 years ago, Johnson & Johnson was founded on the revolutionary idea that doctors and nurses should use sterile materials to dress peoples’ wounds. What is now one of the most diversified health care product manufacturers started out making simple antiseptic gauze and cotton. Today, in addition to making and marketing prescription drugs, the company does business in consumer products (including familiar brands Tylenol, Band-Aid, Neutrogena, Splenda, and Listerine) and medical devices and diagnostics (Acuvue contact lenses, surgical instruments, joint replacements, orthopedic products, and sutures).
The company’s pharmaceutical division is its largest segment, accounting for 40 percent of sales. It operates in four units including Centocor, Ortho-McNeil, Janssen, and Noramco. In recent years, the consumer division of J&J has been doing particularly well, and has grown substantially since its 2006 acquisition of Pfizer’s consumer health business.
The company’s broad product base is a result of its unique organizational structure, which consists of affiliates and operating arms around the world—250 operating companies in 57 different countries, to be exact. Its strategy is to ally itself with and acquire companies dedicated to developing new technologies. Because of patent losses, J&J also has an enormous research and development department, spending $5 billion on R&D in 2008.
In 2007, J&J announced a series of organization changes focused on strategy and growth to identify new opportunities not already targeted by its businesses, and two new business operating groups: a Surgical Care Group and a Comprehensive Care Group to address worldwide chronic and pervasive conditions. "Much of the change in health care reflects the coming together of parts of the system that were at one time separate," William C. Weldon, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Johnson & Johnson said in a press release. "The very solutions that the health care system most needs–those coming from the convergence of science, technology and services–are the ones we are most capable of providing."
The company also announced it would be trimming costs by letting go of 4 percent of J&J’s global workforce, the bulk of the cuts coming from the pharmaceuticals segment.