Teva's Long Road Back
Teva is the closest thing Israel has to an industrial national champion — and for a decade, the closest thing it had to a slow-motion crisis. The Allergan debt, the Copaxone cliff, the opioid settlements, and the Pivot to Growth that turned it around.
The world's largest generic drugmaker is also Israel's largest company by employees — and after a decade of debt, opioid liability, and a collapsing patent cliff, it is finally posting consecutive years of growth.
Teva Pharmaceutical Industries (NYSE and TASE: TEVA) is the closest thing Israel has to an industrial national champion — and for most of the last decade, it was the closest thing the country had to a slow-motion corporate crisis. The arc from there to here is the most consequential turnaround story in Israeli business, and it is now visibly working.
Founded in Jerusalem in 1901, Teva built itself into the world's largest manufacturer of generic medicines — the unglamorous, high-volume business of making off-patent drugs at scale. For over 120 years it has been a fixture of the Israeli economy: tens of thousands of employees, a TASE index anchor, a source of national pride disproportionate to any single product.
How it broke
Three things nearly broke Teva in the second half of the 2010s.
The Allergan generics deal. In 2016 Teva closed a roughly $40 billion acquisition of Allergan's generic-drug unit, Actavis Generics — a debt-financed bet at the top of the generics market. Pricing pressure then collapsed the economics. The deal loaded Teva with debt it spent years digging out from under.
The Copaxone cliff. Copaxone, Teva's blockbuster multiple-sclerosis drug, was the profit engine that justified everything else. Generic competition eroded it. The single most important branded product in the company's history went from cash cow to managed decline — most recently forecast around the $700 million range, a fraction of its peak.
Opioid liability. As a generic manufacturer, Teva was swept into the U.S. opioid litigation. It finalized a nationwide settlement worth roughly $4.25 billion, payable over years in cash and in supply of the overdose-reversal drug naloxone. Separately, in 2024 Teva agreed to pay $450 million to resolve U.S. Justice Department claims tied to Copaxone copay assistance and generic price-fixing — payable through 2029, with no admission of liability.
The Pivot to Growth
In 2023, under CEO Richard Francis, Teva launched what it calls the "Pivot to Growth" strategy — four pillars: lead with the innovative-medicine portfolio, step up the pipeline, sustain the generics powerhouse, and focus the business through divestitures and cost cuts.
The numbers have followed. Teva reported full-year 2025 revenues of $17.3 billion, up roughly 4% year over year — its third consecutive year of growth. The growth engine is no longer generics but a branded innovative portfolio led by AUSTEDO (tardive dyskinesia), which crossed $2.26 billion in 2025, alongside AJOVY (migraine) and the long-acting antipsychotic UZEDY.
And the balance sheet — the thing that nearly sank the company — is healing. Teva brought gross debt down to roughly $16.8 billion and net debt to about $13.3 billion by the end of 2025, with a net-debt-to-EBITDA ratio around 2.5x and a stated target of 2x by 2027. The deleveraging that looked impossible in 2017 is now a scheduled glide path.
Why it matters to Israel
Teva is not a startup story. It is the counter-story — the proof that Israeli business is not only the exit-driven venture machine the rest of this publication documents, but also a place that builds and rebuilds century-old industrial giants.
A healthy Teva matters to Israel in concrete terms: it is one of the country's largest private employers, a heavyweight in the TA-35, and a globally recognized Israeli brand in 57 markets. Its near-death and recovery is a case study in what happens when a national champion over-leverages into a deteriorating market — and what disciplined operational focus can do to reverse it.
The work isn't finished. The 2x leverage target is a 2027 goal, not a 2026 fact. The innovative portfolio has to keep outrunning generic erosion and U.S. drug-pricing pressure. But the direction of travel is no longer in question.
For the first time in a decade, the most important sentence about Teva is not about what it owes. It is about what it earns.