Catálogo de Investigaciones 2017-2018

130 FACULTAD Managing Subsidiary Divestment through Time- Puerto Rico’s Pharmaceutical Industry Experience from 1960 to 2016 Existing literature on foreign divestiture has focused on the independent business situations of individual subsidiaries, rather than their positions within global networks. The objective of this article is to study foreign divestment events by evaluating activities that have occurred in the pharmaceutical industry for an extended period of time. This qualitative research seeks to evidence the divestment activities of foreign subsidiaries from the U.S, Germany, England, Canada and Sweden, among others located in Puerto Rico for a sixty-year period. The findings show that the merge and acquisitions of plants occurred in Puerto Rico in the nineties resulted in an excessive concentration of production plants, thus exceeding their productive capacity, creating a duplication of operations and obtaining product lines that were not in their business strategies. An important finding in the study was that the disinvestment decisions of the manufacturing plants have shown that many events of partial detachment occur before their definitive closure. A finding that our analysis also revealed is that in the maturity stage of the industry, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find buyers for plants. Therefore, abandonment of these plants has increased after several years of searching for buyers. Among the reasons that can be established are: the obsolescence of the divested plants and their size is no longer necessary in the new production system of the global pharmaceutical industry. In many of the cases, the plants were created for blockbuster ethical drugs that at some point lost their patent, moreover the drugs manufactured became low cost generic drugs, their dosage usage changed, or the production and technology systems used became obsolete. It was shown that in the maturity stage of the industry, decisions to abandon plants are a result of the absence of potential buyers in specific locations. dr. luis m. baquero rosa international journal of multinational corporation strategy divestment decision process internacional divestment caribbean subsidiaries pharmaceutical manufacturing operations subsidiary management styles