PFIZER, the world’s biggest drugs company, has appointed Jeffrey Kindler as its next chief executive, ushering Hank McKinnnell into early retirement.

Kindler, a former McDonald’s executive, was previously Pfizer’s general counsel. The appointment of a lawyer to the top job may indicate the changing priorities in the pharmaceutical industry. In common with many leading companies, Pfizer faces patent battles over its biggest-selling drugs and product liability suits.

Pfizer, which makes Viagra, the impotence treatment, was the pharmaceutical industry’s most successful company in the 1990s, but has struggled since McKinnell succeeded Bill Steere in January 2001.

McKinnell’s $60 billion (£32 billion) acquisition of Pharmacia — the company that provided Pfizer with the blockbuster painkiller Celebrex — was poorly received, and contributed to a 37% slide in the company’s share price.

Like other leading companies, Pfizer, which has a substantial research base in the UK, has struggled to find the new medicines it needs to replace those losing their patent protection.

Pfizer’s challenge is particularly acute. In Lipitor, its cholesterol-lowering drug, it has the world’s biggest-selling medicine, one which generated $12 billion of sales last year. Such a product presents an extremely attractive target for the generic companies that seek to produce low-cost copies of successful drugs.

Kindler is 51 and has worked for Pfizer since 2002. To succeed McKinnell as chief executive, he had to see off the challenge from Karen Katen, who heads the group’s pharmaceuticals business, and David Shedlarz, its chief financial officer.

Reports this weekend suggested internal tensions caused by the succession race prompted Pfizer’s board to make an early decision at a special meeting on Friday. McKinnell will continue as chairman until next February, one year earlier than his scheduled retirement date.

Pfizer is renowned within its industry as an enormously powerful marketing machine. However, this approach — and the numerous calls its sales representatives make to doctors — has come under increasing criticism in recent years.

McKinnell has also had to cope with a slump in the sales of Celebrex after Vioxx, a similar drug from Merck, had to be withdrawn because of serious side-effect problems. Vioxx is now at the centre of a multi-billion-dollar wave of litigation.

Pfizer recently sold its consumer healthcare business to Johnson & Johnson, its American rival, for $16.6 billion. The company has said it plans to spend $17 billion on acquisitions to stimulate growth, and a similar sum on share buybacks.

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