The fox and the grapes

Remember Aesops fable of the fox and the grapes?

ONE hot summer’s day a Fox was strolling through an orchard till he came to a bunch of Grapes just ripening on a vine which had been trained over a lofty branch. “Just the things to quench my thirst,” quoth he. Drawing back a few paces, he took a run and a jump, and just missed the bunch. Turning round again with a One, Two, Three, he jumped up, but with no greater success. Again and again he tried after the tempting morsel, but at last had to give it up, and walked away with his nose in the air, saying: “I am sure they are sour.”

Moral: Sometimes when we cannot get what we want, we pretend that it is not worth having.

Now read this:

Boots Healthcare International (BHI) would also have been "nice to have" but was not essential to the success Glaxo's consumer health division, said Julian Heslop, GSKs CFO.

Glaxo was one of six final bidders for BHI in a $3bn auction finally won by Reckitt Benckiser last week. Europe's biggest drug maker has been mentioned persistently as a bidder for smaller British rival AstraZeneca Plc but Heslop said Glaxo planned to stick with its core strategy of developing its portfolio of new drugs.

"There are huge amounts of rumours but as you can see we've done nothing and we think that's right," he said at the Summit held at Reuters headquarters in London "Of course, from time to time, we run our slide-rule over what is out there but the net result of that is that we have stuck to our knitting. "We to date haven't found any strong strategic reasons or good financial benefits from undertaking any major acquisitions."

Heslop said cost-cutting remained an important focus for the British-based company and, in the long term, Glaxo hoped to be able to devote more resources to research and development by reducing the amount spent on selling medicines.

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