NEW YORK – Pfizer Inc. hailed its planned $68 billion takeover of rival Wyeth as an ideal combination, but analysts say the deal will only partially solve some of the New York drug giant’s long-term problems.

The revenues generated by Wyeth’s most attractive products, such as pediatric vaccine Prevnar, won’t be sufficient to make up for the loss of $12.4 billion in annual revenues Pfizer faces when the patent on its anticholesterol drug Lipitor expires in 2011, analysts told the Wall Street Journal.

Pfizer agrees to pay $68 billion to acquire rival Wyeth in the largest pharmaceutical deal in nearly a decade. WSJ Health Blog editor Scott Hensley tells Kelsey Hubbard how the deal buys Pfizer some time as it counts down to 2011, when its cholesterol drug Lipitor patent expires.

And some of them expressed doubts about how the newly created behemoth, with a combined $71 billion in revenues, would discover enough new products to generate growth. “Moving that needle is going to be extraordinarily difficult,” said Timothy Anderson, a health-care analyst at Sanford Bernstein.

Pfizer still employs several thousand people at R&D facilities in Kalamazoo and Holland. The company closed its Ann Arbor labs more than a year ago. Those facilities were recently sold to the University of Michigan.

Anderson forecast that, between 2010 and 2015, the combined company’s revenues will drop by $11 billion to $62 billion. Health-care analysis firm Datamonitor estimates that products accounting for 38.5% of Pfizer’s 2007 sales will face generic competition by 2013. With the addition of Wyeth, the outlook improves only slightly: 34.7 percent of the combined company’s products will face patent expirations by then.

The takeover announcement came amid the kind of bleak industry news that caused Pfizer Chief Executive Jeffrey Kindler to search for a big deal to begin with. The two companies said their net income was down in the fourth quarter. Pfizer reported taking a record $2.3 billion charge to resolve a federal investigation into the off-label marketing of withdrawn painkiller Bextra.

Kindler said the takeover, which he cemented after months of secret meetings and a last-minute increase in the offer to $50.19 a share, should answer shareholder concerns about Pfizer’s prospects. He said that in buying Wyeth, Pfizer wasn’t just acquiring a prescription-drug business, but also consumer-product and animal-health units that would diversify its revenue base.

Pfizer said it expects to shave $4 billion in costs from the combined company, eliminating about 19,500 jobs, or 15 percent of the combined work force, by the end of 2012. It also will halve its quarterly dividend to 16 cents a share, starting in the second quarter.

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