Kenneth Frazier, chairman and CEO of Merck, speaks during an event with the French-American Foundation in Paris on July 11, 2018.ERIC PIERMONT/Getty Images
Merck & Co Inc’s Kenneth Frazier will stay on as chief executive beyond 2019, the drugmaker said on Wednesday, after it scrapped a policy requiring its CEO to retire at the age of 65.
Frazier, who turns 65 in December 2019, took the helm in 2011. Since then, the company’s stock price has doubled and its cancer immunotherapy Keytruda has raked in blockbuster sales, becoming one of the leading products in a new generation of oncology treatments.
“CEO succession has been our top priority, and removing the mandatory retirement policy enables the Board to make the best decision concerning the timing of that transition,” Merck’s lead director Leslie Brun said.
Frazier made headlines last year after he became the first business head to leave the president’s now disbanded manufacturing council following Trump’s comments on a white nationalist rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Under Frazier, the firm also announced price cuts for some of its medicines, including a 60 per cent reduction on a hepatitis C treatment, in July after Trump criticized drugmakers for failing to help reduce healthcare costs for consumers.
The grandson of a sharecropper, and son of a janitor, Frazier’s appointment to the helm in 2011 made him the only black CEO among large U.S. and European drugmakers.
Merck’s shares were up slightly in early trading on Wednesday.