Bayer’s €2.4B Nubeqa Bet: Why Sebastian Guth Killed Sales Targets
Most sales targets are a legal way for managers to sandbag. Bayer scrapped them—and Nubeqa reached €2.4 billion in global sales in 2025.
Most sales targets are a legal way for managers to sandbag.
That sounds harsh because it is. On September 10, 2026, Bayer Pharmaceuticals COO Sebastian Guth said the quiet part out loud: when you give managers a number and a budget to defend, many will negotiate the number down, grab as much cash as possible, then call themselves heroes for barely beating a mediocre plan.
Bayer decided to stop assigning sales targets to countries and regions. Not reduce them. Not add another dashboard beside them. Stop assigning them.
Before you copy that move and throw your annual plan in the bin, understand what Bayer actually changed. This was not a warm-and-fuzzy exercise in “empowerment.” It was a hard reset of who gets to make capital-allocation decisions, how quickly they make them, and who wears the consequences.
Bayer removed the number—not the accountability
Guth, Bayer Pharmaceuticals’ worldwide chief operating officer and president of Bayer U.S., says the old model created exactly the behaviour any experienced operator would expect.
If a country manager is measured on a negotiated annual sales number, the rational move is not to find the biggest opportunity. It is to secure the easiest number to beat.
Say a business expects pressure from patent expiries. A manager argues for a 4% sales decline, protects their budget, and later delivers a 3% decline. Everyone claps because the plan was beaten. Meanwhile, the business still went backwards.
That is not performance. That is administratively approved underachievement.
Bayer had a very real version of this problem. Two of its biggest products, Xarelto and Eylea, faced loss of exclusivity. The easy corporate response would have been to divide up a conservative forecast, allocate budgets, and spend the year defending it in review meetings.
Instead, Guth says Bayer asked a different question: what would it take to grow anyway?
That shift matters more than it first appears. A target asks, “What can you safely promise?” A mission asks, “What is possible if we make difficult trade-offs?”
Those are completely different conversations. One produces politics. The other can produce judgement.
Nubeqa became the test case—and it reached €2.4 billion in 2025
The flagship example was Nubeqa, Bayer’s prostate-cancer treatment.
By the second half of the year, the U.S. business was preparing to pull investment from Nubeqa because money had already been spent elsewhere. Anyone who has run a growing company knows this film: the budget is locked, the prize is obvious, and the organisation is too busy protecting last quarter’s decisions to move.
Bayer’s answer was to let the Nubeqa team ditch the standard brand plan and pursue what it called its “Quest for a Billion.”
One opportunity was serving U.S. veterans. The team partnered with a contract sales force in under an hour and launched the program within 45 days. Guth says that, in a conventional large-company process, the same decision could have taken months.
The result was not a motivational poster. Nubeqa became the fastest-growing drug in its category in the veterans community in 2024, with utilisation up 60%. Once the program had done its job, the team shut it down and reallocated attention.
That last bit is the part most companies miss. Starting initiatives is easy. Killing them when the return has peaked is where grown-up management begins.
Nubeqa reached blockbuster status five months ahead of schedule and contributed to global sales of €2.4 billion in 2025. That is the number worth paying attention to—not because one medicine proves every management theory, but because it demonstrates what can happen when people closest to the market can move resources before the opportunity has expired.
This is really a fight against annual-budget theatre
Annual budgets are useful. I use plans. I like numbers. Any founder who says they do not care about forecasts is usually just avoiding accountability with better branding.
But annual budgets become dangerous when people mistake them for strategy.
Markets move. Competitors move. Customers change their minds. Good staff leave. Product launches disappoint. A regulation lands. A new channel opens. The business that can reallocate talent and money fastest usually wins—not the business with the prettiest spreadsheet from nine months ago.
Bayer’s redesign appears to be about replacing fixed local ownership with enterprise ownership. Guth describes a late-2024 discussion where the head of Latin America effectively said, “We are all the U.S.” That did not mean Latin America suddenly stopped mattering. It meant a regional leader accepted that the best return for Bayer at that moment was elsewhere.
Try getting that answer in a normal divisional planning meeting.
Most executives are paid, promoted and praised for defending their patch. Then the CEO wonders why every division says it needs more headcount, more marketing and more capital. You have designed a system where self-interest is the safest career move, then act surprised when people behave accordingly.
Bayer’s approach tries to make leaders responsible for the whole business rather than landlords of their little fiefdoms.
That is the right ambition. It is also bloody difficult.
The overlooked angle: this only works if the centre gets better
There is a fashionable management fantasy that decentralisation means headquarters can relax. Wrong.
Removing local sales targets does not reduce the need for leadership. It raises the standard.
If you give teams more discretion without clearer strategic priorities, faster information and sharper review rhythms, you have not created accountability. You have created expensive improvisation.
Bayer did not merely say, “Do whatever you reckon.” Guth describes more scrutiny of plans, continual questions about where the biggest opportunities are, and active decisions on what to stop. That is the operating model.
The centre has to become better at four things:
1. Setting non-negotiables. Teams need to know which outcomes, customers, margins, quality standards and risks are sacred. 2. Making resources movable. If every dollar and person is permanently owned by a function or country, your organisation is not agile. It is just decentralised bureaucracy. 3. Reviewing reality frequently. Annual planning is too slow. Monthly theatre is too shallow. You need a cadence where facts can overturn yesterday’s opinion. 4. Backing people who surrender turf. If a leader gives up budget for the good of the enterprise and gets punished at bonus time, the whole system collapses next year.
This is why copying only the headline—“no sales targets”—would be idiotic. The mechanism is not the absence of a number. The mechanism is high-trust, high-data, high-consequence decision-making.
Bayer’s 2025 timing makes the experiment more credible
Bayer was not making this move from the comfort of an easy growth cycle. Its pharmaceuticals business was dealing with the loss of exclusivity for major products, while the wider group remained under pressure to execute its strategic priorities and manage a substantial debt load.
That is precisely when most corporate leaders become more controlling. They freeze budgets, multiply approvals and demand more reporting. It feels responsible because it looks busy.
Often it just makes the business slower at the exact moment speed matters most.
Bayer reported that its U.S. business now accounts for more than 30% of pharmaceutical sales, up from 19% a few years ago. Guth also points to growth in China, including doubled sales of Kerendia and 70% growth in Nubeqa sales.
None of that means Bayer has cracked the code forever. Guth himself calls the transformation a work in progress. Fair enough. Every management system works until the incentives, people or market change.
But the principle is solid: accountability should sit with the people making decisions, not with a number negotiated before the facts arrived.
What this means for you
Do not abolish targets on Monday morning. That would be performative nonsense.
Instead, run this test on your own business this week: find the three biggest opportunities currently starved of money, people or executive attention because the annual budget allocated resources somewhere else.
Then ask the owners five blunt questions:
- If we could move resources today, what would you stop funding? - What outcome would justify that move within 90 days? - Who has authority to make the decision without a committee circus? - What evidence would prove the bet is wrong? - When will we kill it, sell it or scale it?
That is the useful part of Bayer’s experiment. Replace target negotiation with capital-allocation discipline.
Your managers should not be rewarded for making a timid promise and exceeding it by a whisker. Reward them for identifying the best use of scarce resources, making a clear bet, admitting quickly when it is wrong, and putting the company ahead of their own department.
That is what ownership looks like.
Everything else is just a budget meeting with nicer catering.