AstraZeneca Agrees to Buy Alexion for $39 Billion -- 2nd Update
12 Dezember 2020 - 3:40PM
Dow Jones News
By Jenny Strasburg
LONDON -- AstraZeneca PLC said it agreed to buy Boston-based
Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc. for $39 billion in cash and stock, a
move that would bolster the British drug giant's footprint in
immunology and rare diseases.
The deal comes at a pivotal time for AstraZeneca, which is in
late-stage development of a leading Covid-19 vaccine developed in
partnership with the University of Oxford. The vaccine is being
reviewed by U.K. and European medicines regulators, and could be
authorized for emergency use in the U.K. within weeks, scientists
involved in it have said.
The company has embarked on one of the most ambitious efforts to
manufacture and distribute the vaccine among a handful of Western
pharmaceutical giants, assuming it gets the green light for its
shot. With the Alexion deal, it is now also pursuing one of the
biggest drug-industry deals of the year.
AstraZeneca said Alexion will give it a greater scientific
presence in immunology, with a rare-disease unit based in Boston.
Directors of both companies have approved the acquisition, which
they expect to close in the third quarter of 2021.
AstraZeneca has reinvented itself in recent years as a
cancer-drug powerhouse. It had suffered years of shrinking revenue
as blockbusters in its portfolio were hit by generic competition
when patents expired.
AstraZeneca's said its cash-and-stock agreement amounts to $175
per Alexion share, based on the one-month average value of
AstraZeneca's U.S.-traded American depositary receipts. The offer
is split between $60 in cash and 2.1243 American depositary shares.
That represents a 40% premium over Alexion's one-month share-price
average, AstraZeneca said. Alexion's shares closed Friday at
$120.98.
The companies have been talking for several months, said
AstraZeneca Chief Executive Pascal Soriot. Mr. Soriot said that the
disruption should be minimal for AstraZeneca's work rolling out a
global Covid-19 vaccine, adding that for a deal this attractive,
"You do it when the opportunity arises."
He and AstraZeneca's chief financial officer, Marc Dunoyer, told
reporters on a call Saturday that AstraZeneca and Alexion don't
overlap a great deal geographically, and Alexion's roughly 3,000
employees will be fairly simple to integrate.
AstraZeneca expects to have regulatory approvals by the third
quarter, possibly sooner, by which time they will be well into the
vaccine rollout, the executives said. "Our belief is that by Q3 the
world won't have returned to total normalcy, but close enough," Mr.
Soriot said.
(More to come)
Write to Jenny Strasburg at jenny.strasburg@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 12, 2020 09:25 ET (14:25 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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