Do we like them?

Do we like AstraZeneca?

Makes prescription medicines, especially cancer, heart, diabetes and respiratory drugs, plus vaccines. Based in Cambridge, UK.

Our score: 7 out of 10. We'd back them with some reservations. They make important medicines and have credible climate targets. Against that, there's a long record of settlements and a serious China fraud case.

AstraZeneca is a UK-based drugmaker run by CEO Pascal Soriot, with Michel Demaré as chair. Its filings show Soriot buying 60,000 shares himself in September 2026. Its 2025 results showed revenue up 8% to about $58.7bn, driven by cancer, heart and metabolic, respiratory and rare-disease drugs.

The biggest live drama is in China. Chinese prosecutors indicted AstraZeneca's China unit and its former executive vice president Leon Wang, along with a former senior employee, Caixin reported. The charges include illegal collection of personal information and illegal trading. Wang and the other employee also face medical-insurance fraud charges. The company told the FT and Reuters it wasn't alleged to have received illegal gains from Wang's offences.

In the US, it has a history of settling cases while denying wrongdoing. It paid $425m over claims that its heartburn drugs caused kidney disease. In 2026 it agreed to pay Texas $34m over a 'free nurses' kickback lawsuit. In 2010 it settled Seroquel marketing allegations with the US government for $520m.

On the plus side, it has been serious on climate. It was one of the first seven companies to get net-zero targets verified by the Science Based Targets initiative. It says it had cut its own operations' emissions by 77.5% by the end of 2024. In October 2025 it also struck a US pricing deal offering discounts of up to 80% on some drugs. That's why we land in the middle-to-good range.