The offer for Zentiva, which is based in the Czech republic, comes as the big drugmaker struggles with the usual twin problems afflicting pharma - thinning pipelines and expiring patents. By outbidding PPF Group, Sanofi hopes to win cheaper copies of heart, pain and inflammation meds.

If successful, Sanofi would, in fact, add more than 180 generic medicines, including copies of Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Glucophage diabetes pill and Merck’s Zocor cholesterol drug, as well as the top spot in Turkey, Romania and Slovakia, according to Bloomberg News.

The market for generics, by the way, is growing at twice the rate of brand-name meds, and Sanofi only gets about 2 percent of sales from generics. Meanwhile, Sanofi’s first-quarter profit fell 12 percent, and generics of its two best-sellers, the Plavix and Lovenox clotting drugs, are on the way. We should note, however, that Sanofi already owns 25 percent of Zentiva.

“They want to position themselves as a major actor in the generics market as one way to deal with national regulations,” Denise Anderson, a Landsbanki Kepler analyst, tells Bloomberg. “Companies see this as a way to enter emerging markets where branded drugs are still too expensive. We see generics as an extremely volatile business.”