About a year after QuintilesIMS was born from a megamerger between Quintiles and IMS Health, the contract research giant has decided to turn the page and rebrand as IQVIA, pronounced as “I-Q-via” /ai’kjuːviə/.
The new name echoes the origin of the company’s services as from IMS (I) and Quintiles (Q), “but it is ‘VIA’ the path forward that we hope to inspire and ignite real change—the potential to use data and science to find better solutions for humans,” company spokesperson Tor Constantino told FierceCRO.
The company will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the new ticker IQV starting from Nov.15.
Quintiles and IMS are such legacy brands that it’s hard to imagine why the company wouldn’t capitalize on their reputations, but IQVIA clearly has bigger ambitions, to not be confined by some old fames however glorious.
“Now that we have completed the majority of our integration activities, we are ready to refocus our attention outward and introduce a new brand to the market. A brand that demonstrates our courage to reimagine what is possible and create solutions for a bold, better future of healthcare,” Constantino said.
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When IMS merged with Quintiles, it provided a new paradigm where market data and analytics are integrated into a CRO’s offerings. The rebranded company intends to follow that path, backed by a new platform called Core, which Constantino said “is much more than an information repository.” Providing the world’s largest curated healthcare information source, analytics, technologies and industry knowledge across therapeutic areas and geographies, it will become an integral part to IQVIA's offerings, according to the company.
The new brand was unveiled on the back of a strong third quarter at the CRO. Its revenue for the quarter was $2.02 billion, growing 4.8% compared to the same period last year, and acquisitions contributed about 1.5 percentage points to that growth.
And data also played a part. Its real-world business grew double-digit, according to company chairman and CEO Ari Bousbib during a conference call on Oct. 26. “Our differentiated approach will utilize secondary data and advanced analytics to gain regulatory approval for label extension,” he said, pointing to the fact that it won a multimillion-dollar deal in the field with a leading U.S. biotech.
At the same time, Bousbib said—as he did in previous quarters—that his company’s Next-Gen clinical offering is getting more contracts, including three trials with a top 10 pharma, which IQVIA had done no full-service clinical work with in about a decade, and a NASH study from a top 20 global pharma, which previously did R&D mainly in house.