AstraZeneca may buck a decade of pharma strategy to buy U.S. scale

Pharma investors reeled this week from reports that AstraZeneca held merger talks with U.S. rival Bristol Myers Squibb, a move that would break from Big Pharma's decade-long strategy of acquiring smaller companies.The Financial Times and Reuters reported earlier this week that there had been preliminary talks between the U.K. pharma giant and the U.S. company. CNBC has not independently confirmed the talks. AstraZeneca's shares slid on Monday but recovered slightly after Reuters quoted a "senior source" on Wednesday denying there had been talks. The stock is up nearly 9% over the past 12 months.A merger appears unlikely due to antitrust issues and significant business overlap, according to a flurry of analysts who reviewed the reported deal talks in notes to clients on Monday. But the reports had the industry thinking about a kind of dealmaking it has avoided for more than a decade.A merger would be among the pharmacy industry's biggest-ever deals and create a company valued at roughly $400 billion. It'd give AstraZeneca, the U.K.'s largest drugmaker, something years of smaller deals couldn't easily provide: scale in the U.S., deeper commercial operations and access to Bristol Myer...