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Teva makes and sells generic, branded, and biopharmaceutical medicines to patients and healthcare markets around the world.
Teva is one of the world's largest medicine makers, and its biggest business by far is copycat drugs. When a drug's patent expires, Teva swoops in and sells the same chemical recipe under its own label at a fraction of the original price. That is the generic business, and it is a volume game: thin margins per pill, but billions of pills. Teva sells these to pharmacies, hospitals, insurers, and governments in dozens of countries, and it is one of the few companies with the scale to make almost any common pill profitably.
The second leg is branded and specialty medicines, where Teva actually invents and owns drugs rather than copying them. Its best-known is Copaxone, a multiple sclerosis treatment that was a cash cow for years — until cheaper copycat versions ate into it, a painful lesson in how fast patents can stop protecting you. Teva also sells Austedo for movement disorders and Ajovy for migraines, part of a push into newer specialty drugs that carry higher prices and better margins than commodity generics. It also makes active pharmaceutical ingredients, the raw chemistry that goes into pills, which gives it some control over its own supply chain. The business is headquartered in Israel but operates globally, with a particularly large footprint in the United States and Europe. Its customers are not really patients paying at the counter — they are the middlemen: insurers, pharmacy chains, and government health programs that decide whose pills get reimbursed. That makes Teva a price-taker in generics, where competitors like Novartis's Sandoz unit and Viatris fight for the same shelf space, and prices can spiral downward fast when several makers launch the same copy.
Teva's big vulnerability is debt. It borrowed heavily to buy Allergan's generics business in 2016, a bet that looked smart until generic prices collapsed and Copaxone lost patent protection. The stock cratered, and the company spent years paying down the load and cutting costs. Its free cash flow now goes largely toward reducing that debt and funding the specialty-drug pipeline, with a modest dividend. The turnaround hinges on whether Austedo, Ajovy, and newer launches can grow fast enough to offset the steady erosion of the generic price war.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026