In the run-up to the horse race that resulted in Glaxo choosing Andrew Witty as its next ceo, there were whispers that he held an advantage for a geographic reason - unlike his rivals, Witty didn’t spend as much time in the US. The retiring ceo, JP Garnier, lives in Philadelphia, where Glaxo has US headquarters. Meanwhile, David Stout, who heads global pharma, is a US citizen, and Chris Viehbacher, heads Glaxo pharma in the US.

Why should this have mattered? A lot of Glaxo’s largest investors in the UK have been antsy this year over the drugmaker’s stock performance, given the need to replace big sellers going off patent and, of course, the thrashing over the Avandia diabetes pill debacle. Getting the attention of top management seemed, at times, difficult when they were across the pond a great deal.

Although Witty was reportedly a favored choice by Glaxo chair Chris Gent, analysts say that choosing him to succeed Garnier signals a recognition that the rest of the world - beyond the US - is of growing importance to the drugmaker. “If you are looking for expansion, you look east,” Navid Malik, an analyst at Collins Stewart, told The Telegraph earlier this week.

So perhaps Witty will not be in a rush to set up shop in Philadelphia, as Garnier has done. A Glaxo spokeswoman tells us that Witty isn’t a US citizen and doesn’t have a home here. “We do not know what he might do in the future,” she writes us. Unless Witty starts househunting, there’s no telling what this may mean for Glaxo’s Philly digs.