Juan López-Belmonte, president of Rovi Pharmaceutical Laboratories, dies

The hitherto president of Rovi Pharmaceutical Laboratories, Juan López-Belmonte López, 74, died yesterday, as the company itself communicated to the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV) on Tuesday. Consequently, the first vice-president of the board of directors, Javier López-Belmonte Encina, will exercise the functions of the presidency until the appointment of a new president, according to the succession plans and corporate procedures foreseen.

Rovi has stated that she will always be grateful “for the commendable work carried out by its president and that it will honor his example. In 2015, Rovi, founded in 1946, approached in an extraordinary general meeting of shareholders the agreement to reorganize the participation of its main shareholder, the López-Belmonte family, in order to favor the generational change in the management of the laboratory. Then, the company already advanced that the current president, Juan López-Belmonte López, was going to give up executive functions in the short term, although without leaving office.

The López-Belmonte Encina family, through Inversiones Clidia, is the first shareholder of Rovi, in which they recently put 3% of the pharmaceutical company up for sale. However, the family, which is among the richest in Spain, reiterated its willingness to remain the largely majority shareholder of Rovi, a company in which it also committed to maintaining its stake for the next three months.

In a context marked by the coronavirus pandemic, Rovi plans to double its manufacturing capacity for Moderna’s vaccine from 600 million doses in 2021 to 1.4 billion in 2022 with the investment in two new production lines at its San plant. Sebastián de los Reyes (Madrid).

In these more than 70 years of history, his contributions in the field of low molecular weight heparins stand out. Rovi, which made its international leap in 2002 thanks to Bemiparina, debuted on the stock market at the end of 2007, boosting its international growth and expansion ever since.