The announcement today that Hartmut Retzlaff has stepped down as CEO of Stada ‘due to a serious long-term illness’ comes as something of a surprise, but the reasons are not hard to discern. For weeks, activist investors in the form of a group called...
Oh My: Mylan, Meda and muddle
Mylan’s announcement last month that it has agreed to buy Meda for $9.9bn was greeted with a distinct lack of enthusiasm by the stock market, which marked the company’s shares down 18% the following day. This was a reversal from the recent norm in...
Into the void: All change in UK generics in 2016
Teva’s announcement last year that it was to acquire Allergan’s generic assets (‘Actavis’), came as a total surprise to the market. All the more so since Teva was, at the time, in hot pursuit of Mylan. It was particularly startling news in the UK,...
Goodbye sanofi, hello Zentiva
For us, the big headline from sanofi’s recent ‘meet the management’ day in Paris was the company’s announcement that it was reviewing the future of its European generics operation. This is as a consequence of the strategic review that has resulted in the creation...
Midsummer M&A madness
The generic/specialty pharma M&A frenzy appears to have reached its apogee in recent days, with Mylan making an unsolicited bid for the OTC specialist, Perrigo and Teva subsequently bidding for Mylan – conditional on the Perrigo bid being dropped. Share prices have risen all...
Retail therapy: Is it the answer for Teva?
The past year has been a good one for investment bankers, lawyers and accountants, as companies have gone on a massive M&A binge fuelled by cheap debt and highly rated equity. It has also been a generally good year for shareholders, who are benefiting...
Mylan sticks with the Abbott habit
Mylan’s July announcement that it planned to acquire Abbott’s developed markets business looked like the start of a possible series of deals between big pharma and generics companies, but the survival of the transaction appeared in doubt following AbbVie’s decision to back out of...
And in the blue corner: Valeant
The great thing about takeover battles in the US is that they are so much more interesting than they are in the UK. In contrast to the polite press releases that accompanied Pfizer’s recent unsuccessful attempt to buy AstraZeneca, Valeant’s ongoing efforts to get...
Sun buys Ranbaxy and keeps the M&A merry-go-round turning
The announcement that Sun is to buy Ranbaxy from Daiichi Sankyo comes hot on the heels of Meda’s rejection of an approach by Mylan and Actavis’s successful takeover of Forest, illustrating the rapid pace at which the generic industry is changing shape – not...
Forest felled by Actavis
Actavis announced last week that it would pay an EV of $25bn to take control of Forest Labs, the equity component of which represents a 25% premium to Forest’s closing price the previous Friday. The deal will be 70% stock, 30% cash, with the...