And Then There Were Three…Bidders
Make a commentBy Ed Silverman // May 10th, 2007 // 3:18 pm
For Merck KGaA’s generic unit, that is.
The last round of drugmakers willing to pay about $6.5 billion includes Germany’s Stada, Israel’s Teva and Mylan Labs from the US. Other bidders dropped out last week, when the price started rising, according to the Handelsblatt newspaper.
Selling the business could help cut debt Merck took on to help finance its purchase of Swiss group Serono, Europe’s biggest biotech company. Merck’s generics business had sales of around $2.4 billion last year, ranking the unit fourth in the world behind Teva, Novartis’s Sandoz unit and Barr Pharmaceuticals.
Source: Reuters[tags]Generics, Merck KGaA, Mylan Laboratories, Stada, Teva[/tags]