Shareholders have high hopes for Bayer’s new boss

After Bill Anderson, Bayer’s new boss, arrives on April 1st at the firm’s headquarters in Leverkusen, Werner Baumann, the German drug-and-chemicals giant’s outgoing chief executive, will be on standby for two months to ensure a smooth transition. Given Mr Anderson’s lack of experience in crop sciences, Bayer’s biggest business, you might ask what the board was thinking handing him the reins. The answer is that he has two qualifications that make up for his shortcoming. He used to run the pharmaceuticals business at Roche, a Swiss drug behemoth. And he is American. That makes him just the man for a company that is betting big on its pharma business across the Atlantic.Mr Anderson will need to get up to speed with three challenges facing Bayer. He must deal with the legacy of Mr Baumann’s ill-fated $63bn takeover in 2018 of Monsanto, an American crop-chemicals firm. Then there are Bayer’s transatlantic ambitions. By the end of the decade it wants to double its drugs sales in America, the world’s biggest market—and launch new treatments to replace blockbusters like Xarelto, a blood-thinner whose patent protection expires this year. Last, Mr Anderson needs to deal with calls for a split of Bayer’s pharma and crop-science businesses, or at least a sale of the consumer-health unit, which makes Aspirin, Alka Seltzer and other non-prescription staples.