I use to work for SNY, but they are now undergoing some heavy refocusing and restructuring. They recently shut down many of their facilities in USA, France, Germany, and one site UK. Including downsizing their R&D base, they also laid off a majority percentage of their sales force. Their pipeline is struggling, as the last 5-8 years their upcoming blockbusters were beaten down by the FDA, and their competition becoming even more fierce by beating them to the market with better alternatives.
Right now, Sanofi-Aventis is using their Vaccine program from Pasteur as a crutch to stand themselves up on and recently were downgraded from the #1 provider to #2 - beaten by (I believe) GSK.
Veihbacher is the master of the market ploy. He is making the company turmoil look like a "a transition". He sold off many of SNY's assets, including downsizing the work force significantly, and banking everything off the newly acquired company Genzyme.
Genzyme knows how to capitalize on niche markets, like the new treatment for Pomp disease that could potentially bring in over 10 billion in revenue. then again, I could name a dozen products that had potential billion dollar markets that dried up fairly quickly. Moving to biologics is a more stable growth platform indeed, and also a lot harder for companies to make generics for. I do hope for the sake of whatever is left of SNY by the end of this year, goes well with Genzyme. SNY just used a good portion of their cash reserve and raised long term debt to buy Genzyme.
The reason why their stock was on a decline was because they reached a patent cliff and are now using all their cash to try to supplement what they do not have anymore, blockbusters. The recent political climate, and the uncertainty of insurance companies dropping coverage on most of these niche drugs does not help.