This is beginning to look like a diversification strategy. The drugmaker has agreed to buy a 25 percent stake in Alcon from Nestle and may acquire another 52 percent to become the world’s biggest maker of eye-care products. Alcon is the biggest player in the $25 billion eye-care market and sells a variety of products used in eye surgery, as well as over-the-counter contact lens, eye drops and vitamins.

Buying Alcon would add $5.6 billion in sales and give Novartis the Opti-Free contact lens treatment and the Travatan glaucoma medicine, Bloomberg News notes. Novartis, which already owns Visudyne eye drops, makes the move after experiencing repeated delays in getting new drugs approved and has lost sales to generic competition.

The acquisition follows $13 billion Novartis paid to buy two generic drugmakers, Hexal and Eon Labs, in 2005 and its $5.7 billion acquisition of vaccine maker Chiron in 2006. “Novartis will be able to count on cashflow long term, and that makes it attractive,” Karl Heinz Koch, an analyst at Bank Vontobel, tells Bloomberg. “It fits into the strategy of further diversification. This is an attractive deal at attractive conditions.”

Here is the Novartis statement…