(Teleborsa) – The American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is in a shopping mood, also to achieve a tax advantage with the so-called “tax inversion”, which recently ended up in the sights of the Obama administration.
According to the rumors circulating in the operating rooms, the pharmaceutical company would have set its sights on Actavis Plc, a company with tax headquarters in Ireland, to which it allegedly sent an offer in cash and shares of which the details are not known. However, the Board of Actavis allegedly rejected the proposal, putting an end to the negotiations.
Actavis, which has a market value of 60 billion dollars, is the second prey to end up in the sights of Pfizer, which this year also attempted to acquire the British big Astrazeneca, without success.
For its part, Actavis has also done its best to carry out M&A operations with tax implications, acquiring Warner Chilcott for 5 billion pounds and the US Forest Laboratories for 25 billion dollars.
Wednesday 24 September 2014 – Teleborsa
2014 is a «boom» year for mergers and acquisitions: volumes return to pre-crisis levels
by Andrea Franceschi – September 23, 2014 – The sun24 HOURS
The latest operation "with a bang" was announced by the German Merk, the oldest chemical-pharmaceutical company in the world (it was founded in 1668) which today has a turnover of something like 11 billion euros a year, which has flat 17 billion dollars for the American Sigma Aldrich. Over the weekend, another big name in German industry, Siemens, announced two significant transactions: the acquisition of the American Dresser-Rand (supplies for the oil industry) for 7.6 billion dollars and the sale for 3 billion euros of half of its joint venture with Bosh in the household appliances sector.
September is historically one of the busiest for the M&A market and it was the same this year. Bloomberg calculates that 16 new deals worth more than a billion dollars were announced last week alone, for a total amount of 105 billion dollars. The previous year, the balance stood at 43.7 billion.
But it is not only the month of September that shows important surprises: overall, 2014 is proving to be a particularly brilliant year for the mergers and acquisitions market. According to the S&P Capital IQ database, in fact, since the beginning of the year the market value, taking into account all operations (announced, concluded and cancelled) has reached the threshold of 3,290 billion dollars. A share that is higher than that recorded overall last year (approximately 2.9 trillion). In fact, the volume of transactions has returned to pre-crisis levels given that to find such a vintage we need to go back to 2007, the year in which transactions were recorded for over 4,800 billion dollars.
