Belén Garijo

No building kingdoms at the top.

— Belén Garijo

~*~

Overview

Belén Garijo
Born	(1960-07-31) July 31, 1960 Almansa, Spain
Citizenship	Spanish
Education	Doctor of Medicine; specialization in clinical pharmacology
Alma mater	University of Alcalá de Henares
Occupation(s)	Physician; business executive
Employer	Merck KGaA
Known for	First woman to lead a DAX 30 company; CEO of Merck KGaA
Title	Chair of the Executive Board and CEO
Term	2021–2026
Successor	Kai Beckmann
Board member of	BBVA; L'Oréal (former)
Spouse	Spanish urologist (name not publicly disclosed)
Children	Two daughters
Awards	Germany Diversity Honorary Award; Honorary Ambassador of the Spain Brand; John McCloy Award; Hija Predilecta of Almansa

📌 Belén Garijo (born 31 July 1960) is a Spanish physician and business executive who has served as chair of the executive board and chief executive officer (CEO) of Merck KGaA, a German science and technology company, since 2021, becoming the first woman to lead the 350-year-old group and the first woman to head any constituent of Germany's DAX blue-chip index. A former hospital physician and clinical pharmacologist, she built a three-decade career in the pharmaceutical industry before taking Merck's top job, holding senior roles at Abbott Laboratories, Rhône-Poulenc Rorer, Aventis and Sanofi and becoming one of Europe's most prominent women executives in healthcare and chemicals.

🌍 Global profile. As CEO, Garijo has positioned Merck KGaA as a "global science and technology leader" spanning healthcare, life-science tools and electronics, steering the group through the COVID-19 pandemic, supply-chain disruptions and shifting geopolitics while advocating a long-term, innovation-led strategy. Drawing on her medical background, she has described her approach as treating the company like a patient, focusing on underlying causes rather than symptoms, and has become an influential voice on topics such as sustainable innovation, diversity in leadership and the future of European industry.

~*~

Early life and education

🎓 Origins and family background. Garijo was born on 31 July 1960 in Almansa, a town in Spain's La Mancha region, and grew up as the eldest of four siblings in a modest household where her father worked as a civil servant and her mother was a homemaker. Raised far from Spain's corporate centres, she has recalled that her family placed particular emphasis on education and public service rather than business careers.

🧪 Medical studies and clinical pivot. A strong student, Garijo moved to Madrid to study medicine at the University of Alcalá de Henares, qualifying as a physician in 1983 and specialising in clinical pharmacology at Hospital La Paz. She entered the profession at a time when Spain offered relatively few residency posts and has described "fighting in the streets" with other students to secure training positions before turning to clinical pharmacology when coveted internal-medicine roles proved scarce. The experience, she later said, opened her eyes to the world of research and drug development and planted the seed of a future outside the traditional hospital career track.

~*~

Early career in pharmaceuticals

💊 Abbott and the move into industry. After six years in clinical practice, Garijo left bedside medicine in 1988 to join Abbott Laboratories in Spain as a clinical research monitor, seeing the pharmaceutical industry as a way to elevate the profile of healthcare and have broader impact than individual patient care. Within eighteen months she became medical director for Abbott Spain, helping to oversee some of the company's first HIV drug trials in the country, and by 1994 she had relocated to Abbott's headquarters in Illinois as global medical affairs director, gaining early exposure to international drug-development work.

🧬 Rhône-Poulenc, Aventis and Sanofi. In 1996 Garijo returned to Europe to head oncology for Rhône-Poulenc Rorer in Spain, entering the oncology business just as the company was preparing for consolidation into the new Aventis group. Following the creation of Aventis in 2000 she moved to New Jersey as vice-president of oncology, and from 2003 served as general manager of Aventis in Spain before leading the integration of Aventis with Sanofi and becoming managing director of the combined Sanofi-Aventis business in the country. Between 2006 and 2011 she was based in Paris as president of commercial operations for Europe and Canada, overseeing a wide portfolio across mature and emerging markets and playing a leading role in integrating Sanofi's US$20 billion acquisition of Genzyme in 2011. Business profiles from this period highlighted her ability to stabilise disrupted organisations, unify teams and restore growth following large mergers.

~*~

Career at Merck KGaA

🏭 Healthcare division turnaround. Seeking a new challenge after more than two decades in pharmaceuticals, Garijo joined Merck KGaA in late 2011 as chief operating officer of the biopharmaceutical division Merck Serono, at a time when the unit was viewed as strategically adrift. In 2013 she became president and CEO of Merck's healthcare business, where she trimmed a sprawling product portfolio to focus on areas such as oncology, immunology and fertility, restructured research and development around higher-potential programmes and shifted commercial resources towards markets including the United States and Japan. Under her leadership the healthcare division formed partnerships, including an immuno-oncology alliance with Pfizer, and launched new drugs for cancer and multiple sclerosis, helping to revitalise Merck's pharmaceutical pipeline and earning her a seat on the executive board in 2015. Around this time she was reported to be the highest-paid woman executive in Germany's DAX index, reflecting Merck's assessment of her contribution.

🚀 Chief executive of Merck KGaA. In May 2021 Garijo was appointed chair of the executive board and CEO of Merck KGaA, becoming the first woman to lead the Darmstadt-based group and any DAX 30 company. Taking the helm amid the COVID-19 pandemic, she promoted a "One Merck" culture intended to bring together more than 60,000 employees and pursued a strategy that combined cost discipline with targeted investment, including a shift away from large, transformative mergers towards a "string of pearls" of smaller acquisitions in high-growth fields such as semiconductor materials and oncology. In 2023 Merck agreed to acquire Massachusetts-based SpringWorks Therapeutics for about US$3.9 billion to strengthen its U.S. oncology pipeline, while also exiting non-core businesses and writing down projects that failed to meet expectations; the late-stage failure of the multiple-sclerosis candidate evobrutinib in 2023 was one such setback that Garijo acknowledged publicly as a costly disappointment.

📈 Financial performance and strategic posture. After a pandemic-era boom driven in part by demand for COVID-19 testing supplies, Merck's share price roughly halved between its late-2021 peak and late-2022 as testing volumes normalised and a key cancer therapy faced greater competition. Garijo responded with efficiency measures, a re-examination of the product mix and a renewed push in the life-science tools and electronics businesses, arguing that the group had to address the root causes of underperformance rather than short-term symptoms. By late 2024 the company had returned to growth and issued a more optimistic outlook, with a market capitalisation of around US$60 billion in 2025, even though the share price remained below its pandemic highs. Analysts have linked Merck's long-term orientation in part to its ownership structure: the founding Merck family, through its holding company, controls roughly 70 per cent of the capital, giving management room to resist pressure for expensive mega-deals or aggressive short-term financial engineering.

~*~

Compensation, external roles and wealth

💶 Executive pay and share ownership. As chief executive, Garijo has been among Germany's best-paid corporate leaders, with total compensation of about €11 million in 2023, including a base salary of roughly €1.5 million and a large variable component linked to financial and strategic targets; in earlier years, such as 2017, her package was about half that level. A substantial portion of her remuneration is delivered in performance-based bonuses and long-term share awards, in keeping with Merck's practice of tying executive pay to the group's results. Despite this, she is not a dominant equity holder in Merck KGaA: the Merck family retains around 70 per cent of the share capital, while Garijo holds only a relatively small personal stake.

🏛 Board mandates and estimated wealth. Outside her executive role, Garijo has served as an independent director of the Spanish bank BBVA since 2012 and was a non-executive director of the French cosmetics company L'Oréal until 2024, as well as participating in business forums such as the European Round Table of Industrialists and the Business Council in the United States. These positions, together with her long-standing senior-management roles and incentive share awards, have led commentators to estimate her personal wealth in the tens of millions of euros, although no precise figure has been disclosed.

~*~

Personal life and leadership style

🏠 Family and cosmopolitan life. Garijo is married to a fellow physician, a Spanish urologist, and the couple have two daughters; over the course of her career they have lived in Spain, the United States, France, Switzerland and Germany, maintaining what she has described as a close-knit family despite frequent relocations. Since becoming Merck's CEO she has been based in the Frankfurt area, close to the group's Darmstadt headquarters, while retaining strong ties to her home town of Almansa. In March 2023 Almansa named her Hija Predilecta ("favoured daughter") of the city, praising her success and continued engagement with local community initiatives.

🤝 Leadership style, diversity and views on quotas. Colleagues describe Garijo as combining high expectations and analytical rigour with a personal, attentive manner shaped by her early years as a practising doctor, and she has spoken about cultivating a "High Impact Culture" at Merck in which employees feel they can make a meaningful difference. She is an outspoken supporter of diversity and inclusion in science and corporate leadership, winning a German Diversity Award in 2022 for promoting women and under-represented groups in STEM fields, yet she has also argued that progress should be merit-based, stating in a widely discussed LinkedIn post that she disagreed with mandatory quotas for women on boards and preferred advancement based on ability rather than tokenism. Profiles have noted both her demanding style and her flair – one article, for example, remarked on her fondness for very high-heeled shoes – as emblematic of a leader who blends toughness with approachability.

~*~

Controversies and challenges

⚖️ Shareholder scrutiny and performance debate. Although Garijo has largely avoided personal scandal, her tenure as CEO has attracted scrutiny from some investors because of the group's uneven financial performance in the years after the pandemic boom. Shareholders experienced an estimated 31 per cent decline in total return over the three-year period to 2024, and at the 2025 annual meeting some questioned whether senior executives' remuneration was justified in light of flat earnings and revenue. Proxy advisers noted that while her pay was broadly in line with industry peers, it was difficult to argue that the company was "firing on all cylinders", prompting more detailed communication from management about the long-term strategy and planned recovery path.

🌐 Geopolitics and supply-chain risk. Geopolitical tensions have posed another challenge for Garijo, particularly around relations between the United States and China. In response to debates over possible U.S. tariffs on pharmaceutical imports and export controls affecting high-tech materials, she has pursued a "China for China" strategy in which Merck invests in domestic Chinese production to serve that market locally, while working with Western policymakers to keep key technology flows open and avoid the company becoming collateral damage in trade disputes. The approach has won praise in China but has also prompted concerns elsewhere about over-reliance on the Chinese market, underscoring the delicate balancing act required in managing Merck's global footprint.

🌱 Pipeline setbacks, ESG debates and risk appetite. Like many large healthcare groups, Merck under Garijo has faced scientific and ethical controversies, including the failure of the multiple-sclerosis candidate evobrutinib in late-stage trials in 2023, which triggered questions about the company's research strategy and innovation pipeline. Garijo responded by reshaping R&D leadership in 2024 and urging a more entrepreneurial, less risk-averse culture in both the healthcare and life-science tools businesses. At the same time she has presented herself as a proponent of environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals, highlighting Merck's commitments on carbon-neutral operations and access to medicines, even as activists and some local groups have criticised the company over issues such as plastics use in laboratory supplies and drug pricing. She has generally sought to engage with critics while emphasising the complexity of the trade-offs involved, describing resilience in the face of adversity as a defining feature of her leadership during the pandemic and its aftermath.

~*~

Legacy and recognition

🏅 Awards, "firsts" and public profile. Garijo's appointment in 2021 made her the first woman to lead Merck KGaA and the first female CEO of a DAX blue-chip company, milestones that drew international attention and contributed to repeated listings in rankings of the world's most powerful women by business publications such as Fortune and Forbes from 2022 onward. She has received a series of honours recognising both her business achievements and advocacy for inclusion, among them Germany's Diversity Honorary Award in 2022, designation by Spain's public-diplomacy agency as an Honorary Ambassador of the Spain Brand, the title of Hija Predilecta of Almansa from her home town and the John McCloy Award of the American Council on Germany in 2024 for strengthening transatlantic business ties. Her visibility has made her a regular participant in international forums, including discussions on women and work at the World Economic Forum.

🧭 Cosmopolitan career and future plans. Commentators often point to Garijo's cosmopolitan path – from treating patients in Madrid to holding senior posts on three continents – as central to her leadership identity; she speaks Spanish and English fluently and is conversant in French and German, and has said that the "prodigious" last decade of her career reflects the breadth of countries and roles she has traversed. In September 2025 Merck announced that long-time executive Kai Beckmann would succeed her as CEO in May 2026, at the end of her five-year term, while she has indicated that she intends to remain active in the healthcare ecosystem through board roles, mentoring and potentially work in global health policy or philanthropy. Reflecting on her trajectory, she has framed her guiding principle as using science to "advance human progress" and has argued that it is possible to create long-term value for both society and shareholders at the same time.

~*~