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Astra Zeneca

When did the company start?

Bit of a tricky one this! The pharmaceuticals industry is notorious for high product development costs, as you will see elsewhere in this profile. As a result, businesses large enough to fund these costs are often formed from mergers and takeovers of smaller organizations.

AstraZeneca's origins lie in the founding of Astra AB, a Swedish company, in 1913, and Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd (ICI) in the UK in 1926. The Zeneca part of the name comes from the early 1990s, when ICI separated its chemicals activities from its biosciences (including pharmaceuticals) business.

In 1999 Zeneca Group plc and Astra AB formally began trading as a merged single company, known as AstraZeneca.

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