Our Team

Jean Hoffman, Founder and President

Jean Hoffman is president of Q Street Advisors, Inc. She was formerly chairman and CEO of Newport Strategies, a company she founded and built into the pharmaceutical industry’s leading supplier of database systems for generic business development and licensing, product targeting and brand and generic sourcing. In April 2004, she sold Newport to the Thomson Corporation (NYSE: TOC), a $7.6 billion global leader in the provision of integrated information solutions to business and professional customers.

In building Newport over a period of 14 years from a one-person consulting firm into the leader in collection and analysis of worldwide data on generic and active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) development, Ms. Hoffman closed two creative financing transactions and nine major and numerous minor licensing deals. She also led 16 consulting engagements, focused primarily on forecasting the timing, impact and identity of global generic competition for blockbuster branded drugs, including working with client teams on the development of competitive strategy for maximizing branded franchise revenues at the end of the product life cycle.

Ms. Hoffman led Newport and built the team that successfully developed four generations of database products, with the last generation resulting in Newport's achieving 100% market share in sales to global and U.S. generic firms. Under her leadership, Newport’s subscription renewal rate averaged over 90%, the highest in the pharma data sector, and the user base grew 50% with the implementation of the last Newport generation of products.

Ms. Hoffman served as one of the founding members of the Board of the Small Enterprise Growth Fund, a venture capital fund investing in early stage companies in Maine.

Her career in the global pharmaceutical industry spans more than twenty years. She began in 1980 by advising innovator pharma companies on the establishment of joint ventures in, and import contracts with, China and advising Chinese API manufacturers on regulatory and business aspects of exporting to the U.S.

In 1982, Ms. Hoffman joined the Far Eastern-based, Swiss-headquartered, Zuellig Group, initially as manager, China business for MWM Chemical. She concluded China’s first exclusive API supply contract, which encompassed six factories. She led successful negotiations for the first and second rounds of technology and equipment sales to Chinese manufacturers of key fermentation-based APIs for export to the U.S. and Europe, resulting in China’s ascendance to number two worldwide in production of the product.

After becoming general manager, China in 1984, she led business development activity in China on behalf of Zuellig subsidiaries in South East Asia and the U.S. Transactions concluded included API contracts for North American, European and South East Asian markets; technology and equipment sales and tech transfers to Chinese API manufacturers; purchases of, and support for, a Zuellig joint venture in animal feed and health products; and numerous contracts for agricultural chemicals for South East Asia. She managed the technology transfer for the first Chinese direct compression vitamins. Ms. Hoffman speaks Mandarin Chinese.

She was named CEO and a member of the board of directors of ZetaPharm in 1987, a Zuellig-owned agent and distributor of APIs in the U.S. market.  There she developed a new strategy and business plan to turn the company around by focusing on the then-nascent U.S. generic industry and led its implementation. She established several agencies for APIs from Europe and China and established exclusive supply relationships for key APIs in the U.S. generic industry. Ms. Hoffman successfully resolved the API side of one of the industry’s largest product recalls, for a product for which ZetaPharm was the agent, involving extensive meetings with the customer’s technical and senior management team and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) concerning polymorphs.

A cum laude graduate of Bowdoin College in Maine, Ms. Hoffman studied at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and completed executive education programs at Stanford University Graduate School of Business and Columbia University Graduate School of Business. She speaks frequently at international pharmaceutical conferences and has published numerous articles in leading industry publications.

A member of the Executive Advisory Committee of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Generic Medicines and the Licensing Executives Society, she is active in the International Generic Pharmaceutical Alliance and the Generic Pharmaceutical Association (GPhA). A native of Washington, D.C., Ms. Hoffman lives in Maine and is the mother of two children.