Johnson & Johnson
Johnson and Johnson is an American multinational pharmaceutical and medical technology corporation headquartered in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Founded in 1886, it is among the largest healthcare companies in the world and one of only a small number of American corporations to hold the highest credit rating from both major agencies for an extended period.
| Johnson and Johnson | |
|---|---|
| Type | Public |
| Traded as | NYSE: JNJ; Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 component |
| Industry | Pharmaceuticals, medical devices |
| Founded | 1886, New Brunswick, New Jersey |
| Founder | Robert Wood Johnson I, James Wood Johnson, Edward Mead Johnson |
| Headquarters | New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Key people | Joaquin Duato (chairman and chief executive), Joseph Wolk (chief financial officer) |
| Products | Prescription medicines, surgical instruments, orthopaedic implants, cardiovascular devices, contact lenses, diagnostics |
| Revenue | Approximately US$88.8 billion (2024) |
| Employees | Approximately 138,000 |
| Website | jnj.com |
For most of its history the company operated in three segments, pharmaceuticals, medical devices and consumer health, the last comprising some of the best-known household brands in the world including Band-Aid, Tylenol, Listerine, Neutrogena and Johnson's Baby products. In August 2023 it separated that business as Kenvue, leaving a company concentrated on prescription medicines and medical technology.
Its corporate identity has rested for eighty years on Our Credo, a statement written in 1943 by Robert Wood Johnson II placing the company's responsibilities in order: first to patients, doctors, nurses and parents; then to employees; then to communities; and last to shareholders. The document is carved in stone in the headquarters lobby, and the company's handling of the 1982 Tylenol poisonings, in which it recalled 31 million bottles nationwide at a cost of approximately US$100 million on evidence of seven deaths in one metropolitan area, is the standard example taught of a corporation acting on such a statement.
The same company has paid many billions of dollars to settle claims that its talcum powder caused cancer and that it misrepresented what it knew, that its subsidiaries contributed to the American opioid epidemic, and that several of its medical devices and medicines were marketed improperly, and it has made three unsuccessful attempts to resolve the talc litigation through the bankruptcy of a subsidiary created for the purpose.
History
Antisepsis and the founding, 1886 to 1932
Robert Wood Johnson I had heard Joseph Lister lecture in Philadelphia in 1876 on the role of airborne organisms in surgical infection, at a time when American surgeons generally rejected antisepsis and operated in coats stiffened with the residue of previous procedures. Johnson concluded that a business could be made of supplying sterile materials ready for use.
He founded the company in 1886 in New Brunswick with his brothers James and Edward Mead Johnson, in a former wallpaper factory with fourteen employees. Its first product was a sterile surgical dressing, packaged individually, sterilised by dry heat and sealed, which could be used by a surgeon anywhere without preparation. It was a substantial commercial success and a substantial public health one, and the company published a manual on antiseptic method that it distributed free to physicians.
Edward Mead Johnson left in 1897 to found Mead Johnson, which became a leading infant nutrition company. Robert Wood Johnson died in 1910 and was succeeded by his brother James.
Products followed from the same principle of supplying sterile or convenient materials for care. Johnson's Baby Powder was introduced in 1894, after physicians reported that the talc supplied to soothe skin irritation from medicated plasters was being used on infants. The Band-Aid adhesive bandage was invented in 1920 by Earle Dickson, a cotton buyer whose wife cut herself frequently while cooking and for whom he prepared strips of surgical tape with gauze already attached; the company put it into production and gave several million free to Boy Scouts, and it became among the most recognised consumer brands in the world.
The company also produced sanitary protection from 1896, dental floss, first aid kits for railways and factories, and sutures through the Ethicon business established in 1915.
Robert Wood Johnson II, the Credo and decentralisation, 1932 to 1963
Robert Wood Johnson II, known as the General after his service as a brigadier general in the Ordnance Department during the Second World War, led the company from 1932 to 1963 and shaped it decisively.
He wrote Our Credo in 1943, shortly before the company's public listing, setting out its obligations in an order that placed shareholders last. The document preceded by three decades the corporate social responsibility literature that subsequently made such statements common, and it was intended as an operating instrument rather than a statement of aspiration: the company has conducted a Credo survey of employees for decades asking whether managers act consistently with it, and it has been invoked explicitly in major decisions.
He also established the decentralised structure that defined the company for eighty years. Johnson and Johnson operated as a federation of more than 250 operating companies, each with its own management, profit responsibility and considerable autonomy, on the reasoning that businesses close to their markets make better decisions and that managers who run something they are accountable for perform better than those who administer a division. The structure produced entrepreneurial energy, duplicated costs, and a compliance problem that became apparent later, since a parent with limited visibility into subsidiaries cannot readily supervise them.
International expansion began with Canada in 1919 and Britain in 1924, and by the 1950s the company operated in a considerable number of countries. It listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1944.
Janssen, pharmaceuticals and the Tylenol crisis, 1961 to 1990
The acquisition of Janssen Pharmaceutica in 1961 transformed the company. Paul Janssen, a Belgian physician and chemist, had founded the firm in 1953 above his father's business in Beerse and had already synthesised several compounds of consequence; over his career his laboratories produced around eighty medicines, including haloperidol for schizophrenia, fentanyl, loperamide, ketoconazole, risperidone and a large number of antifungals and anthelmintics. He is generally regarded as among the most productive medicinal chemists in history, and the acquisition gave Johnson and Johnson a research organisation it did not have. Janssen continued to operate with substantial independence, consistent with the decentralised structure, and the pharmaceutical business traded under the Janssen name until 2024.
McNeil Laboratories, acquired in 1959, brought Tylenol, an acetaminophen analgesic made available without prescription from 1960 and marketed to physicians as the alternative for patients who could not take aspirin. It became the leading over-the-counter pain reliever in the United States.
The 1982 Tylenol murders
In late September and early October 1982 seven people in the Chicago area died after taking Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules that had been removed from shops, filled with potassium cyanide and returned to the shelves. The perpetrator was never identified.
Johnson and Johnson's response has been the standard case study in crisis management for four decades. The company halted production and advertising, warned the public not to take the product, cooperated fully and publicly with investigators, and recalled approximately 31 million bottles nationwide at a cost of some US$100 million, although the contamination was confined to one metropolitan area and was manifestly not a manufacturing failure. James Burke, the chief executive, appeared personally and repeatedly and directed the response by reference to the Credo.
The product's market share fell from 37 per cent to 7 per cent and had largely recovered within a year, after the company reintroduced it in triple-sealed tamper-evident packaging, an innovation that became a regulatory requirement for over-the-counter medicines across the United States within months and subsequently worldwide. Capsules, which could be opened and refilled without trace, were replaced with solid caplets.
The episode is taught as an instance of a company incurring very large certain costs to avoid uncertain harm, and of the commercial value of having done so.
Medical devices and the modern portfolio, 1990 to 2020
The company built a medical technology business through acquisition on a large scale. Ethicon supplied sutures and surgical instruments and developed minimally invasive surgical devices. DePuy, acquired in 1998, supplied orthopaedic implants, and its 2012 combination with Synthes, acquired for approximately US$21.3 billion, created the largest orthopaedic company in the world. Cordis supplied cardiovascular devices and was sold in 2015. Biosense Webster leads the market in catheters for the electrophysiological treatment of atrial fibrillation. Vistakon produced the Acuvue contact lenses, the first disposable soft lenses sold at scale.
Pharmaceutical products of the period included Procrit, Risperdal, Levaquin, Topamax, Concerta, Remicade, which was among the first monoclonal antibodies for autoimmune disease, Velcade for myeloma, Xarelto for anticoagulation, Invokana for diabetes, Imbruvica for blood cancers, Stelara for psoriasis and inflammatory bowel disease, Darzalex for myeloma, Erleada for prostate cancer, Tremfya, Opsumit, Uptravi and the CAR-T therapy Carvykti.
Alex Gorsky led the company from 2012 to 2022, a period of very large pharmaceutical growth and of the litigation described below.
COVID-19, the Kenvue separation and the present, 2020 to 2026
Janssen developed a COVID-19 vaccine using an adenovirus vector and a single dose, which received emergency use authorisation in the United States in February 2021 and was expected to be particularly valuable where cold chain and second-dose logistics were difficult. Its use was paused in April 2021 after reports of a rare syndrome of thrombosis with low platelets, principally in younger women, and although the pause was lifted with a warning, demand did not recover and the company ceased supply in 2023. Approximately 19 million doses were administered in the United States and considerably more elsewhere.
Joaquin Duato, a Spanish executive who had joined Janssen in Spain in 1989, became chief executive in January 2022.
On 23 August 2023 the company completed the separation of its consumer health business as Kenvue, which holds Tylenol, Band-Aid, Listerine, Neutrogena, Aveeno, Johnson's Baby, Nicorette outside the United States, Zyrtec and Motrin. The separation followed those conducted by GSK with Haleon and by Sanofi and was justified on the same reasoning: the two businesses require different capital, different skills and different risk tolerance, and the consumer business was growing more slowly while carrying a substantial share of the talc liability by association.
Since the separation the company has pursued medical technology aggressively, acquiring Abiomed, maker of the Impella heart pump, in December 2022 for approximately US$16.6 billion, and Shockwave Medical, whose intravascular lithotripsy breaks up calcified arterial plaque with sound waves, in May 2024 for approximately US$13.1 billion. It also acquired Ambrx for antibody-drug conjugates, V-Wave, Proteologix, Intra-Cellular Therapies in 2025 for approximately US$14.6 billion for the psychiatric medicine Caplyta, and Halda Therapeutics.
It retired the Janssen name in 2024, rebranding the pharmaceutical business as Johnson and Johnson Innovative Medicine and the devices business as Johnson and Johnson MedTech, ending a distinction that had existed since 1961.
Its principal commercial challenge is the loss of exclusivity on Stelara, among the largest-selling medicines in the world, which faced biosimilar competition from 2025 and which the company has sought to replace with Tremfya, Darzalex, Carvykti and the medical technology acquisitions.
Products and brands
Historic consumer brands
Although the consumer business passed to Kenvue in 2023, the brands it holds were created by Johnson and Johnson and are the source of the company's public recognition.
Band-Aid, invented in 1920, is among the small number of trademarks that have become the general term for a product category in ordinary speech, a condition trademark lawyers regard as a danger and marketers as an achievement. Johnson's Baby products, introduced from 1894, created the category of infant toiletries and were for a century among the most trusted brands in the world, a position the talc litigation damaged substantially. Tylenol became the leading over-the-counter analgesic in the United States and the subject of the 1982 poisonings. Listerine, acquired with Pfizer's consumer business in 2006, was named for Joseph Lister and was marketed from the 1920s through a campaign that popularised the term halitosis, an early and much-studied example of creating demand by naming a condition. Neutrogena, Aveeno, Clean and Clear, Carefree, Stayfree, o.b., Motrin, Zyrtec, Benadryl and Nicorette complete the principal portfolio.
Medicines of historic significance
Beyond the current portfolio, the company's laboratories produced a number of medicines of lasting importance. Haloperidol, synthesised by Paul Janssen in 1958, remains on the World Health Organization's list of essential medicines and was for decades the standard antipsychotic. Fentanyl, synthesised by Janssen in 1960, is among the most important analgesics in surgery and intensive care, and its illicit analogues have since become the principal cause of overdose death in North America, a consequence of the molecule's potency rather than of the company's conduct. Loperamide, ketoconazole, itraconazole, risperidone, mebendazole and levamisole also originated at Janssen, and the last two transformed the treatment of parasitic infection in the developing world.
Procrit, a form of erythropoietin, and Remicade, among the first therapeutic monoclonal antibodies, were commercially very large and were each the subject of controversy: the first over marketing that encouraged use at doses later found to increase mortality in some patients, and the second over the strategies used to delay biosimilar competition, which produced antitrust litigation settled in 2022.
Global health and access
Johnson and Johnson has conducted a number of substantial global health programmes, including the donation of mebendazole for intestinal worms, of which several billion doses have been supplied through partnership with the World Health Organization, a programme that has treated hundreds of millions of children; the development and supply of bedaquiline for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis at reduced prices and, after sustained campaigning by Médecins Sans Frontières and others, the withdrawal of secondary patents in most low and middle income countries in 2023; and the supply of HIV medicines under licensing arrangements.
Its COVID-19 vaccine was offered on a not-for-profit basis during the pandemic and was intended particularly for use where refrigeration and second doses were difficult, and its withdrawal from the market after the thrombosis findings and the collapse in demand removed an option that had been expected to matter in low-income settings.
The company has ranked in the middle of the Access to Medicine Index, above the average and below GSK and Novartis, and has been criticised over the bedaquiline patents and over pricing of cancer medicines while credited for the deworming programme and for its tuberculosis research, a field almost entirely abandoned by the industry.
Paul Janssen
Paul Janssen, born in Turnhout in 1926, qualified in medicine at Ghent and founded his research laboratory in 1953 with the intention of making medicines rather than practising. His laboratories synthesised more than 80 medicines, of which some are still in use seven decades later and four appear on the World Health Organization's list of essential medicines, an output no individual chemist has matched.
His method was systematic variation of molecular structure guided by a hypothesis about the receptor being addressed, conducted at a pace and volume that his contemporaries found difficult to reproduce, and combined with an insistence that every compound be tested in living systems early rather than characterised exhaustively in vitro. He also maintained a personal clinical interest, corresponding with physicians about individual patients, and was among the first to argue that psychiatric illness was a matter of neurochemistry addressable by molecules.
He sold the company to Johnson and Johnson in 1961 in order to obtain the capital required to develop what his laboratory produced, on terms preserving his scientific independence, and continued to direct research until shortly before his death in 2003. Janssen Pharmaceutica remained in Beerse, a small Belgian town, and the presence of a world-leading pharmaceutical research organisation there is a direct consequence of where its founder happened to live.
Manufacturing and quality
The company operates manufacturing in a considerable number of countries, producing sterile injectables, biologics, solid dose medicines, implants, instruments and consumer goods, each under different regulatory regimes.
Its quality record has been mixed. Between 2009 and 2011 McNeil Consumer Healthcare, the subsidiary producing Tylenol and children's medicines, conducted dozens of recalls over metal particles, incorrect concentrations, foul-smelling packaging traced to a wood treatment chemical used on shipping pallets, and inadequate quality systems. The Food and Drug Administration placed three plants under a consent decree with federal oversight in 2011, congressional hearings examined a so-called phantom recall in which contractors had been engaged to buy defective product from shops rather than announce a recall, and the episode was traced by investigators to cost reduction and to the weakening of quality oversight after the business was reorganised.
Its manufacturing of the COVID-19 vaccine also encountered difficulty when a contractor, Emergent BioSolutions, contaminated a batch at its Baltimore facility in 2021, requiring the destruction of tens of millions of doses and the removal of the contractor from the programme.
The company has since consolidated quality and manufacturing under central management, one of the principal changes to the decentralised structure.
Pricing and policy
Johnson and Johnson's medicines are subject to the same pricing controversy as the rest of the industry, and it has been an active participant in the resulting disputes.
Stelara's list price in the United States exceeded US$25,000 a course by the 2020s, several times its price in European countries, and the company defended the differential on the ground that American prices fund research consumed worldwide. It was among the first companies to have products selected for negotiation under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which gave Medicare authority to set prices for high-expenditure medicines, and it sued unsuccessfully to prevent the programme on constitutional grounds.
It has also been prominent in the disputes over the 340B programme, restricting discounts to contract pharmacies, and in litigation over the rebate arrangements with pharmacy benefit managers. In 2024 it was sued by an employee alleging that it had breached its fiduciary duty under employee benefit law by failing to negotiate adequately for the medicines in its own staff health plan, an action of a novel kind whose outcome could affect every large American employer.
Sustainability and society
The company has committed to carbon neutrality in its operations by 2030 and to net zero across its value chain by 2045, to renewable electricity, and to the reduction of plastic in packaging. Its footprint is dominated by its supply chain and by the energy intensity of sterile manufacturing and of maintaining cold chains.
Its philanthropic activity runs through the Johnson and Johnson Foundation and concentrates on health worker training, having committed to support several hundred thousand nurses, midwives and community health workers; on maternal and child health; and on disease elimination programmes. The Johnson and Johnson Institute provides surgical training to practitioners worldwide, a programme that serves an educational purpose and also familiarises surgeons with the company's instruments.
It was among the earliest large American companies to report workforce composition, to establish employee resource groups and to extend benefits to the partners of employees in same-sex relationships, and its nursing campaign, which has funded scholarships and public promotion of the profession since 2002, is the largest sustained corporate intervention in a labour market of that kind.
Sponsorship and public health campaigns
Johnson and Johnson has conducted sponsorship of a kind closer to public health promotion than to conventional marketing. It was a worldwide partner of the Olympic Games from 2005 to 2016, emphasising athlete care and community health programmes rather than product advertising, and has sponsored the FIFA Women's World Cup and a number of athletics and endurance events.
Its Campaign for Nursing's Future, begun in 2002 in response to a projected shortage of nurses in the United States, funded scholarships, produced documentaries and recruitment material and is credited by nursing organisations with contributing to a measurable increase in applications to nursing programmes. It has since been extended internationally as a commitment to support several hundred thousand nurses, midwives and community health workers.
The company's advertising for its consumer brands, before their separation, was among the most extensive in the world, and its Johnson's Baby campaigns in particular established an association between the brand and infant care of a strength that took the talc litigation more than a decade to erode.
Notable people
Beyond the founders, figures of consequence include Robert Wood Johnson II, whose Credo and decentralised structure defined the company and who also served on the War Production Board and campaigned for small business interests; Earle Dickson, the cotton buyer who invented the Band-Aid and became a vice-president; James Burke, who directed the Tylenol response and whose handling of it is taught in every business school; Paul Janssen; and Alex Gorsky and Joaquin Duato, the two most recent chief executives.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, endowed with company stock on the death of Robert Wood Johnson II in 1968, is legally independent of the company and is among the largest philanthropic funders of health policy and public health research in the United States, with assets in the tens of billions of dollars. Its funding has supported work critical of the pharmaceutical industry, a circumstance that reflects the independence of the endowment from the enterprise that created it.
Corporate structure
The decentralised structure established by Robert Wood Johnson II operated for eighty years and is the single most distinctive feature of the company's history. At its greatest extent more than 250 operating companies held their own boards, brands and profit responsibility, and the parent functioned as a capital allocator and holder of the Credo rather than as an operating headquarters.
The advantages were speed, accountability and the ability to acquire companies without destroying them, and the company's acquisition record is materially better than that of most large pharmaceutical firms for that reason. The disadvantages became apparent in the 2000s: a series of manufacturing failures at McNeil Consumer Healthcare between 2009 and 2011 produced dozens of recalls, a consent decree placing three plants under federal supervision and congressional hearings, and the investigations found that quality systems had deteriorated while central oversight had not detected it.
The company has centralised progressively since, consolidating manufacturing, quality, procurement and information technology, and the 2023 separation and the 2024 retirement of the Janssen and DePuy Synthes trading names completed a transition from a federation to a conventional corporation.
Timeline
Key dates include the founding in 1886; Johnson's Baby Powder in 1894; the Ethicon suture business from 1915; the Band-Aid in 1920; Robert Wood Johnson II's leadership from 1932; Our Credo in 1943; the New York listing in 1944; the acquisition of McNeil in 1959 and of Janssen in 1961; Tylenol's over-the-counter introduction in 1960; the Tylenol poisonings and recall in autumn 1982 and the introduction of tamper-evident packaging; the disposable contact lens in 1987; the DePuy acquisition in 1998; the Pfizer consumer business acquisition in 2006; the McNeil manufacturing recalls from 2009; the Synthes acquisition in 2012 and the US$2.2 billion Risperdal settlement in 2013; the ASR hip and pelvic mesh litigation through the same period; the Actelion acquisition in 2017; the Reuters talc investigation in December 2018; the Oklahoma opioid judgment in 2019 and the US$5 billion settlement in 2021; the COVID-19 vaccine authorisation in February 2021 and its pause in April; the first LTL Management bankruptcy in October 2021; Joaquin Duato's appointment in January 2022; the Abiomed acquisition in December 2022; the Kenvue separation on 23 August 2023; the Shockwave acquisition in May 2024 and the retirement of the Janssen name; the third bankruptcy rejection in March 2025; and the Intra-Cellular acquisition in 2025.
The Tylenol case in detail
The events of autumn 1982 are examined in management, public health and criminology literature and remain, four decades later, the reference point for corporate crisis response.
On 29 September 1982 a twelve-year-old girl in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, died after taking Extra-Strength Tylenol for a sore throat. Three members of one family in Arlington Heights died the same day; three further deaths in the Chicago area followed within days. An off-duty firefighter and an investigator independently connected the cases by noticing that Tylenol appeared in each, and analysis found potassium cyanide in capsules from several different bottles bought at different shops, which established that the contamination had occurred after manufacture.
Johnson and Johnson's response proceeded in stages. It established a telephone line for the public, halted advertising and production, and cooperated with the investigation by supplying manufacturing records that established where each affected bottle had originated. James Burke convened a small group that met daily and, against the advice of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Food and Drug Administration, both of which feared that a national recall would reward the perpetrator and cause panic, decided to withdraw the product across the country.
The recall covered approximately 31 million bottles with a retail value of more than US$100 million. The company then offered to exchange capsules already purchased for tablets, at further cost, and reintroduced the product in November in packaging with a glued box, a plastic neck seal and a foil seal over the bottle mouth, and supported it with an advertising campaign in which the company's medical director addressed the public directly.
Tylenol's share of the analgesic market, which had fallen from 37 per cent to 7 per cent, exceeded 30 per cent within a year. The Food and Drug Administration issued tamper-resistant packaging regulations within two months, Congress made product tampering a federal offence in 1983, and the capsule form was discontinued by the company in 1986 after a further fatal tampering in New York.
No one was charged with the murders. A man who attempted to extort the company was convicted of that offence, and investigations have continued intermittently, most recently with the re-examination of evidence using techniques unavailable in 1982.
The case is taught principally for the decision to recall nationally. The cost was certain, large and immediate; the benefit was the avoidance of an uncertain number of further deaths and of a reputational loss that could not be quantified; and the company's own account is that the decision was taken by reference to the Credo rather than by calculation. The counter-reading, offered by some analysts, is that the recall was also the commercially correct decision and that the two coincided, which does not diminish it.
Regulation
Johnson and Johnson operates under the Food and Drug Administration in the United States, the European Medicines Agency, and national regulators elsewhere, and its medical devices are regulated separately from its medicines under frameworks that are considerably less demanding.
The device question has been the subject of sustained criticism. The American 510(k) pathway permits a device to be cleared on a demonstration of substantial equivalence to one already marketed, without clinical trials, and the ASR hip and the pelvic mesh products both reached the market by that route, in each case on the basis of equivalence to predicate devices that had themselves been cleared on equivalence to earlier ones. The European system before the Medical Device Regulation of 2017 was similarly permissive, and the Implant Files investigation published in 2018 by an international consortium of journalists documented the consequences across the industry.
Both regimes have since been tightened, requiring clinical evidence for higher-risk devices and establishing unique device identification and registries permitting failures to be detected, and the reforms were driven substantially by the hip and mesh cases in which Johnson and Johnson's subsidiaries were central defendants.
Competition in medical technology
The medical technology industry is consolidating, and Johnson and Johnson's acquisitions of Abiomed and Shockwave were part of a general movement by the largest companies into cardiovascular intervention, where procedure volumes are growing and where devices command high prices.
The competitive dynamic differs from pharmaceuticals in that devices are not protected by a single patent expiring on a known date but by a combination of patents, manufacturing know-how, clinical evidence, surgeon familiarity and hospital purchasing agreements, which makes positions durable and makes displacement slow. A surgeon trained on one company's implants and instruments is reluctant to change, and the company's training programmes are directed at that fact.
The principal competitive threats are the entry of Medtronic and Boston Scientific into pulsed field ablation, where Biosense Webster's electrophysiology franchise is the company's most profitable device business; the dominance of Intuitive Surgical in robotic surgery, which Johnson and Johnson has attempted to address with Ottava after abandoning an earlier venture with Google called Verb Surgical; and the general pressure on implant pricing from hospital purchasing consortia.
Litigation
Johnson and Johnson has been the defendant in more mass tort litigation than almost any company outside the tobacco and asbestos industries, and the aggregate cost has exceeded US$25 billion.
Talc
The company sold talcum powder from 1894, and tens of thousands of claimants have alleged that it caused ovarian cancer through perineal use and mesothelioma through asbestos contamination, talc and asbestos occurring together in nature.
The scientific position is contested. Epidemiological studies of perineal talc use and ovarian cancer have produced inconsistent results, with case-control studies generally finding a small association and cohort studies generally not; the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified perineal talc use as possibly carcinogenic in 2010 and, in 2024, classified talc itself as probably carcinogenic to humans. The mesothelioma claims rest on asbestos contamination, for which the evidence is different in kind, since asbestos is an established cause of that disease.
The company's conduct is less contested. A Reuters investigation published in December 2018, drawing on documents produced in discovery, reported that from at least 1971 the company's own testing had sometimes found small amounts of asbestos in its talc and in the ore from which it came, that executives and scientists had discussed the results internally over decades, and that the findings were not disclosed to regulators or the public. Johnson and Johnson has said that its talc is safe, that the testing methods of earlier decades were less sensitive, that thousands of tests by independent laboratories found no asbestos, and that the Reuters account was one-sided.
A Missouri jury awarded 22 plaintiffs US$4.69 billion in 2018, reduced on appeal to approximately US$2.1 billion, which the Supreme Court declined to review. The company stopped selling talc-based baby powder in the United States and Canada in 2020 and worldwide in 2023, replacing it with cornstarch.
The bankruptcy attempts. In October 2021 the company used a Texas procedure, divisive merger, to place the talc liabilities in a newly created subsidiary, LTL Management, which filed for Chapter 11 two days later while the operating business continued unaffected. The arrangement, called the Texas two-step, would have channelled all claims into a bankruptcy trust and halted the litigation. The Third Circuit dismissed the case in January 2023 on the ground that a company in no financial distress cannot use bankruptcy; a second filing days later was dismissed in July 2023 for the same reason; and a third attempt, through a different subsidiary in Texas with a proposed settlement of approximately US$9 billion, was rejected in March 2025 by a bankruptcy judge who found that the vote of claimants supporting it had been improperly solicited.
The company has since stated that it will litigate the remaining claims in the tort system. The affair is the most prominent instance of a wider controversy about whether solvent companies should be able to use bankruptcy to resolve mass torts, and legislation to prohibit it has been introduced repeatedly.
Opioids
Johnson and Johnson subsidiaries manufactured the opioid analgesics Duragesic and Nucynta and, through Tasmanian Alkaloids and Noramco, supplied a very large proportion of the raw narcotic material from which other manufacturers' opioids were made, including cultivating poppy varieties bred for higher alkaloid yield.
An Oklahoma judge found in 2019 that the company had created a public nuisance through its marketing and ordered it to pay US$465 million, a judgment reversed by that state's supreme court in 2021 on the ground that nuisance law did not extend to the manufacture and sale of a lawful product. The company nonetheless agreed in 2021 to pay US$5 billion over nine years as part of a US$26 billion settlement with the three largest drug distributors, resolving claims by most states and local governments, and to cease selling opioids in the United States.
Medical devices
The ASR hip implant, a metal-on-metal device sold by DePuy from 2005, released cobalt and chromium particles as the components wore against one another, causing tissue damage and requiring revision surgery in a high proportion of patients. It was recalled in 2010, and settlements have exceeded US$4 billion.
Pelvic mesh, supplied by Ethicon for stress incontinence and prolapse, caused erosion, chronic pain and injury in a substantial number of women and produced tens of thousands of claims, settlements in the billions of dollars, and an Australian class action in which the Federal Court found in 2019 that the company had understated the risks. The devices were withdrawn from several markets and are now restricted or prohibited in a number of countries.
Other device litigation has concerned the Physiomesh hernia product and certain surgical staplers.
Pharmaceutical marketing
In November 2013 the company agreed to pay more than US$2.2 billion to resolve criminal and civil claims over the promotion of Risperdal for uses the Food and Drug Administration had not approved, principally in elderly patients with dementia and in children, and over payments to Omnicare, a pharmacy supplying nursing homes. The settlement included a criminal fine and a guilty plea by Janssen to a misdemeanour.
Separate Risperdal litigation concerned gynaecomastia, the development of breast tissue in boys taking the drug, and produced substantial individual verdicts, including an US$8 billion punitive award in Philadelphia in 2019, reduced subsequently to US$6.8 million.
Corporate affairs
The Credo and its assessment
Our Credo is the most frequently cited corporate values statement in existence, and the gap between it and the litigation record is the most frequently made criticism of the company.
Its defenders point to the Tylenol recall, to the continuing practice of surveying employees against it, and to the company's decisions in circumstances where the commercial and ethical calculations diverged. Its critics point to talc, to opioids, to pelvic mesh and to Risperdal, and argue that a company that placed patients first would not have required litigation to change any of these.
Both positions can be held simultaneously, and the most persuasive account is structural: a federation of several hundred operating companies with strong local autonomy produced both the responsiveness the Credo describes and the absence of central control that allowed subsidiaries to behave in ways the parent did not examine. The company has since centralised substantially, and the decentralised structure that defined it for eighty years has largely gone.
Leadership
Chief executives have included Robert Wood Johnson I, James Wood Johnson, Robert Wood Johnson II from 1932 to 1963, Philip Hofmann, Richard Sellars, James Burke from 1976 to 1989, who directed the Tylenol response and was subsequently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Ralph Larsen, William Weldon, Alex Gorsky from 2012 to 2022 and Joaquin Duato since January 2022.
Employees, locations and finances
The company employs approximately 138,000 people, reduced from more than 150,000 before the Kenvue separation, with major operations in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Massachusetts, Florida, Ireland, Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Brazil, China, India and Singapore. Its Beerse campus in Belgium remains among its largest research sites.
It reported revenue of approximately US$88.8 billion in 2024. It has increased its dividend annually for more than sixty consecutive years, one of a very small number of companies to have done so, and held the AAA credit rating from both major agencies until 2024, when one agency reduced it to AA on account of the talc liabilities, leaving Microsoft as the only American company with two AAA ratings.
Businesses
Innovative Medicine
The pharmaceutical business, known as Janssen until 2024, is organised around six therapeutic areas.
Oncology is the largest and includes Darzalex, a CD38 antibody for multiple myeloma and among the best-selling medicines in the world; Erleada for prostate cancer; Imbruvica, a Bruton's tyrosine kinase inhibitor developed with AbbVie whose sales have declined as newer agents have arrived; Rybrevant and Lazcluze for lung cancer with EGFR exon 20 insertions; Tecvayli and Talvey, bispecific antibodies for myeloma; and Carvykti, a CAR-T cell therapy developed with Legend Biotech in which a patient's own T cells are modified to attack myeloma and which has produced durable remissions in patients who had exhausted other options.
Immunology includes Stelara, an interleukin-12 and 23 antibody for psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis, Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, whose loss of exclusivity from 2025 is the company's principal commercial event of the decade; Tremfya, a newer interleukin-23 antibody intended to replace it; Simponi and Remicade, both now facing biosimilars; and Rinvoq's competitors in the oral space.
Neuroscience includes Invega and its long-acting injectable formulations for schizophrenia, which are given monthly, three-monthly or six-monthly and which address the adherence problem that dominates the treatment of that illness; Spravato, an esketamine nasal spray for treatment-resistant depression, the first genuinely new mechanism in that field for decades and administered only in supervised settings; and Caplyta, acquired with Intra-Cellular Therapies in 2025.
Cardiovascular and metabolism includes Xarelto, an oral anticoagulant, and Opsumit and Uptravi for pulmonary arterial hypertension, acquired with Actelion in 2017 for US$30 billion, the company's largest acquisition.
Pulmonary hypertension and infectious disease complete the portfolio, the latter including Sirturo for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, the first new tuberculosis medicine in forty years, and Prezista and Symtuza for HIV.
MedTech
Surgery, through Ethicon, supplies sutures, staplers, energy devices and the Ottava robotic surgical system, which is in development and which competes with Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci, the dominant product in robotic surgery.
Orthopaedics, through DePuy Synthes, supplies hip, knee, shoulder and spinal implants and trauma fixation, and is among the two largest orthopaedic businesses in the world with Zimmer Biomet and Stryker.
Cardiovascular comprises Biosense Webster, whose Carto mapping system and catheters lead the electrophysiology market; Abiomed's Impella heart pumps, which support the circulation temporarily during high-risk procedures or cardiogenic shock; Shockwave's intravascular lithotripsy; and the Varipulse pulsed field ablation system, entering a field in which Medtronic and Boston Scientific compete directly.
Vision comprises Acuvue contact lenses and the surgical products for cataract and refractive procedures acquired with Abbott Medical Optics in 2017.
Research and development
The company spends in the region of US$17 billion a year on research, among the largest such budgets in any industry. Its principal sites are in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Massachusetts, Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands, China and Singapore.
Its research model has combined internal discovery with an unusually extensive external network. The Johnson and Johnson Innovation centres, established from 2013 in Boston, California, London and Shanghai, and the JLABS incubators, which provide laboratory space and services to start-up companies without taking equity or rights, were an early and widely copied approach to sourcing science from outside the company. The company has also conducted a very large number of licensing and acquisition transactions, and a substantial proportion of its marketed products originated elsewhere.
Its historical contributions include the work of Paul Janssen's laboratories, which produced medicines still on the World Health Organization's essential list; the development of the first disposable contact lenses; the coronary stent, which Cordis commercialised; and the sterile surgical dressing with which the company began.
Competition
In pharmaceuticals the company competes with Pfizer, Merck and Co., AbbVie, Bristol Myers Squibb, AstraZeneca, Roche, Novartis, Sanofi and Eli Lilly, and the competitive unit is the individual disease area rather than the company: a firm may lead in myeloma and be absent from diabetes.
In medical technology it competits with Medtronic, the largest pure medical device company; Stryker and Zimmer Biomet in orthopaedics; Abbott and Boston Scientific in cardiovascular; Intuitive Surgical in robotics; and Alcon and Bausch in vision.
Its scale gives it a position in hospital purchasing that few competitors match, since a hospital system negotiating for implants, sutures, catheters and lenses deals with a single supplier, and the company's medical technology strategy has emphasised assembling a portfolio broad enough to make that argument.
Assessment
Johnson and Johnson is among the most successful commercial enterprises of the past century by the ordinary measures: it has grown for more than a hundred years, has increased its dividend for more than sixty, held the highest credit rating available for decades, and has produced medicines and devices that have materially extended and improved a very large number of lives.
It is also the company whose stated values are quoted most often and questioned most often. The Credo is a genuine document that has demonstrably influenced decisions, and the record of talc, opioids, mesh and Risperdal is equally genuine. The attempt to resolve the talc claims through the bankruptcy of a subsidiary created for the purpose, pursued three times and rejected three times, was conducted by a company describing its first responsibility as being to the patients who use its products.
The most defensible conclusion is that the two are not contradictory but sequential: a decentralised organisation of several hundred businesses produced both the responsiveness its founders intended and a supervisory gap that allowed conduct the parent did not examine and would not have approved, and the centralisation and separation of the past decade are the company's own acknowledgement of it.