Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) is among the oldest and most prestigious American companies. Founded in 1886 by three brothers—Robert, James, and Edward Johnson—the company was established in New Brunswick, N.J. While Johnson & Johnson has changed over its long history, the company continues to be a key innovator and pioneer in the health care sector. The company was the first to standardize and mass-produce first aid kits, maternity kits, feminine products, and dental floss, all before 1900.
In Nov. 2021, Johnson & Johnson announced it would divide into two publicly-traded companies—one includes the pharmaceutical and medical devices businesses and the other will comprise the consumer products business.
- The top individual shareholder of Johnson and Johnson is executive chairman Alex Gorsky with 3.2 million shares.
- Joaquin Duato—J&J's chief executive officer—is the second-largest individual shareholder with one million shares.
- Paulus Stoffels, Ph.D., is the third-largest individual shareholder with almost 872,000 shares. Stoffels is JNJ’s former chief scientific officer.
- Jennifer Taubert is a leader within J&J's pharmaceutical research division and is the fourth-largest shareholder with nearly 454,000 shares.
- The fifth-largest individual shareholder of J&J is CFO, Joseph J. Wolk with just over 100,000 shares.
On July 12, 2018, a Missouri jury ordered that the company pay $4.69 billion to 22 women who accused the company's talc-based products, including its baby powder, of containing asbestos and causing them to develop ovarian cancer. In 2017, lawsuits were mostly filed in state courts in Missouri, New Jersey, and California.
The company denies both that its talc products cause cancer and that they have ever contained asbestos. However, the company still faces thousands of pending lawsuits. In April 2020, a U.S. District judge from New Jersey made a decision regarding the expert witnesses that can be called by both sides. The decision paves the way for the trial to proceed in which J&J faces thousands of allegations from those claiming that the company's talcum powder causes cancer.
The 38,000 lawsuits filed against Johnson & Johnson related to the baby powder, however, have been halted as of November 2021. The case is delayed for two months and will be heard in the company’s headquarters in New Jersey. The company has removed its talc powder from store shelves in the U.S. and Canada.
Despite the company's legal challenges, J&J developed a single-shot COVID-19 vaccine.
Below are the top five individual shareholders of Johnson and Johnson.
Johnson & Johnson’s executive chairman, Alex Gorsky, is the largest individual shareholder. As of Feb. 23, 2021, Gorsky holds 3.2 million shares.
Gorsky originally joined JNJ back in 1988 as a sales representative and rose through the ranks of the company. He was named company group chair of JNJ’s pharmaceutical arm and president of Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of JNJ by 2003.
However, Gorsky left JNJ in 2004 after being named the leader of Novartis AG's (NYSE: NVS) pharmaceutical business. After his brief stint at Novartis, Gorsky returned to JNJ in 2008 as a group chair for Ethicon Inc. By 2012, Gorsky was named the CEO and chair of JNJ, where he continues to serve.
Joaquin Duato is the second-largest individual shareholder of JNJ with 1,041,512 shares as of February 2021. Duato currently serves as the company's chief executive officer, a position he has held since 2021. He has been with the company for almost three decades.
Paulus Stoffels, Ph.D., is the third-largest individual shareholder of JNJ with 871,800 shares, as of February 2021. Stoffels served as JNJ’s chief scientific officer since October 2012 and was named executive vice president in May 2016 before retiring in December 2021.
Outside of JNJ, Stoffel specializes in infectious disease treatment and tropical diseases.
Jennifer Taubert is the fourth-largest individual shareholder of JNJ with just over 453,000 shares. She is the executive vice president and worldwide chair of JNJ's Pharmaceuticals. Taubert is a member of the corporation’s executive committee and leads the Pharmaceuticals Group Operating Committee.
Taubert has been a leader within Johnson & Johnson’s pharmaceutical research division, which is called Janssen Research and Development (JRD). Janssen is a consistent and significant contributor to Johnson & Johnson’s overall growth strategy. Janssen is responsible for innovative pharmaceutical developments, including helping the fight against immune-related diseases, HIV, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and mental illness.
The fifth-largest individual shareholder of J&J is Joseph J. Wolk with almost 101,000 shares. Wolk is the executive vice president and chief financial officer (CFO) for Johnson & Johnson. Wolk is charged with developing, leading, and executing JNJ’s global long-term financial strategy.
As the CFO, Joe Wolk leads J&J's Finance and Procurement organizations and leads nearly 9,000 JNJ team employees worldwide. Wolk was appointed CFO in July of 2018 but has been with Johnson & Johnson for 23 years, including as VP of Investor Relations, which involves building strong relationships with J&J investors.
Published Wed, Mar 30 2022 2:10 PM EDTUpdated Thu, Mar 31 2022 10:52 AM EDT
- In his first interview as Johnson & Johnson CEO, Joaquin Duato says at CNBC's Healthy Returns that there will be more innovation in health care over the next ten years than in the past century.
- Johnson & Johnson is spinning off its consumer health business from its biotech and medical technology and forming two companies.
- The medtech business grew 16% in 2021 even as Covid limited procedures, and advancements in surgery using AI are among the breakthroughs that the new CEO is betting on.
Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Joaquin Duato, the new CEO of Johnson & Johnson, is comfortable enough in his new position at the 135-year-old company to issue a bold claim just a few months into the job and during his first interview: he predicts the next decade will see more health-care transformation than occurred during the past century.
Duato, the first non-U.S. born CEO for the company, and first to hold dual citizenship (Spain and U.S.), has been with J&J for three decades and was at one point the company's chief information officer, giving him key insights into the role of technology in health care.
Priority No. 1, Duato told CNBC's Meg Tirrell at Healthy Returns on Wednesday, is the opportunity "to create more progress in health in this decade than we have seen in the last 100 years."
As J&J prepares to split into two companies, Duato said that separating the consumer brands like Band-Aid, Tylenol, Neutrogena and Listerine from medical technology and pharmaceuticals will help the company be at the forefront of surgical techniques that transform health care.
"For the consumer health company, it's going to be an opportunity to deepen the relationships with consumers to attract new investors, to inspire employees, and to be able to have a fit-for-purpose model with their own capital location priorities ... and then for the new Johnson & Johnson it is going to be an opportunity to be more focused, more competitive and to deliver increased growth," Duato said.
Johnson & Johnson, which is a bellwether in the health-care sector for hospital surgeries and procedures, has seen Covid pressure the overall business, but the CEO noted ahead of the upcoming earnings season that it did see good performance in its medical device business in 2021, with close to 16% growth, even as Covid weighed on activity and in particular, elective procedures.
Duato said the company is gaining share in its priority medtech platforms and expects "good" performance this year.
In 2021, the company invested more than $2 billion in innovation, an increase of 23% in the middle of the pandemic. "That's a sign of how much we believe in the opportunity that I was describing ... of combining science and technology to deliver improvements in patient care," Duato said.
Research and development on the drug side is accelerating as well, he said, with a pipeline of 14 new medicines to be filed before 2025. "All of them are providing significant improvements in the standard of care, and at the same time, all of them with more than a billion-dollar potential," he said.
Duato cited the recent approval of CARVYKTI, an antigen receptor T-cell therapy for the treatment of multiple myeloma, which helped 98% of patients who were otherwise likely to be headed for hospice care. "We are very optimistic about the treatment modalities that we are bringing, like cell therapy that are going to enable us have an aspiration to be able to cure some diseases that were thought to be incurable," he said.
Duato, who served as interim CIO at Johnson and Johnson for almost a year in 2019, said that role gave him insights into how artificial intelligence and automation can make surgery smarter. "I see a future in which all medical devices would be smarter, connected to the cloud, being able to provide data to the surgeons for them to be able to in real time deliver better surgical outcomes," he said.
Machine learning, when combined with genetics, is also accelerating the discovery and development of new medicines.
"We can do genomic sequencing, and at the same time with large data sets, utilize AI and machine learning to create patterns in which we can correlate diseases with genomic profiling, to identify what are going to be the underpinnings of diseases that are going to be the triggers, the targets that we are going to be able to utilize in our discovery," Duato said.
New compounds can be measured against a single cell to more rapidly identify pharmacological activity, such as expected toxicities, and accelerate the development of new medicines. "We can plan much better our clinical trials, we are able to create synthetic control groups instead of having placebo groups and we are also able to stratify and identify patients that are difficult to find in rare diseases utilizing algorithms that enable us to identify them," he said. "I'm very bullish about the potential of technology in accelerating discovery and developing new medicines."
The current economic situation is "volatile," Duato said, with inflationary headwinds in the supply chain and availability of important raw materials and components, though he said the company's scale as the largest health-care firm helps and the guidance it already provided to the market earlier in the year showed a healthy growth rate in revenue and in earnings per share.
Inflation will remain a factor, as some pressures alleviate this year but others remain longer, Duato said. The consumer business is more affected by inflationary pressures and there is more concern throughout the market and economy that consumers will begin to buy "off brand" products when they have the option.
"Overall, we've seen volatility in the consumer demand," Duato said, "but we continue to see very solid consumer business coming through and we continue to try to deliver what is best for consumers and we continue to try to mitigate our cost increases by improving our own efficiency, and in some cases also having price increases but overall, we are bullish about the potential of our consumer health business and about our ability to navigate the inflationary pressures in a way that is optimal for consumers," he said.
Johnson & Johnson has faced multiple lawsuits over products and medical devices, from talc to hip replacement and opioids, which have resulted in significant financial settlements, without any admission of wrongdoing, as well as ongoing litigation.
Duato declined to go into legal specifics. "We understand that we have a reputation. We understand that we have a high bar and a high expectation from society overall....Yes, we have some challenges when you refer to the litigation. ... Ultimately, we want to always reach a fair and equitable resolution in order to be able to focus on what we do best. And what we do best is to continue to develop medicines, medical devices, consumer products that improve consumer lives and also are able to address patients' needs."