What with all the job-cuts news this week, we weren’t able to get to hit much more than the high points of Big Pharma’s latest earnings reports. Here’s a roundup of related news for your reading pleasure this weekend.

Like several of its rivals, Sanofi-Aventis is expected to post a 3.5 percent rise in fourth-quarter adjusted net profit next week but give a prudent forecast for 2010 when battles with generic rivals will intensify.

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• Surging sales in emerging markets helped GlaxoSmithKline compensate for declining revenues in the U.S.; CEO Andrew Witty, the architect of GSK’s emerging-markets focus, said the growth shows that strategy is working.

• Glaxo also said it will stop research into new antidepressants and focus on diseases for which it believes it can develop more valuable drugs–a major shift for a company that developed some of the biggest-selling antidepressants of the past 20 years.

• Two and a half years after the papers were signed and the letterhead changed–and at the beginning of a year when the combined company had planned to deliver on some of its first milestones–some analysts say MedImmune has not measured up to the purchase price AstraZeneca paid.

• During the Pfizer analyst call, executives talked about their strategies for winning market share in China–strategies that look a lot like its U.S. tactics back when it was fielding an enormous sales force, the Health Blog notes.

Source: FiercePharma

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