ZURICH – Nestle wants to focus on nutrition and metabolism for its health science business rather than building a broad health care portfolio, its chief executive told investors on Thursday.
“We don’t want to create a soup-to-nuts portfolio of all sorts of consumer health care assets. What we want to do is consistently grow and develop around nutrition and metabolism as our angle into consumer health,” Mark Schneider said during a call on the group’s full-year results.
“A broad-based consumer health care portfolio is something that we kind of signalled low interest in from the beginning, and we stay true to that. And I think it is truly paying off.”
GlaxoSmithKline last month rejected a 50-billion-pound offer from Nestle rival Unilever for its consumer goods arm, saying it would stick to its plan of spinning off the unit.
(Reporting by Silke Koltrowitz; Editing by Madeline Chambers)
