India’s Intas Pharmaceuticals came out on top in the bidding for operations in the UK and Ireland that Teva got in its $40.5 billion deal for Allergan’s generics business but was ordered by regulators to divest to keep competition fair in that part of the world.
Teva said today that Intas, a unit of Accord Healthcare, will pay $767.3 million (£603 million) for the portfolio of drugs, and a solid dose plant in the south of England with 600 employees. The business generated more than £250 million in sales last year.
“The sale has been a success for Teva in that we have satisfied the EU Commission’s sale requirements for these businesses, subject to their final approval, and agreed on a good price for the assets,” Siggi Olafsson, CEO of Teva’s global generic medicines business, said today in a statement.
The plant, makes solid oral dose meds with a capacity of more than 5.9 billion tablets a year. It was recently upgraded by Actavis, which in 2014 won a £1.5 million government grant to help with a £6 million expansion. Intas said the site will be its fourth in the U.K. In March, Intas agreed to buy a 400,000 square-foot plant in Newcastle, England, that the French drugmaker Sanofi closed last year.
Teva was forced to put the Actavis business in the U.K. and Ireland up for sale as a condition of its takeover of Allergan Generics. In Iceland, where Actavis originated, Teva will discard its own business while hanging onto the the operations it got from Actavis. It also was ordered to sell a block of other generic products marketed across Europe.
Intas was in the running for the operations with another Indian drugmaker, Aurobindo. With FDA actions against Indian manufacturing facilities on the rise, many Indian drugmakers have been shopping for facilities in the E.U. and the U.S. to allay any concerns that clients may have about relying on India production.
Just this week at the CPhI show in Barcelona Spain, Michel Le Bars of Switzerland-based M&A consultants Kurmann Partners, said that intense interest from Indian and Chinese drugmakers in getting an EU or U.S. footprint was one of the key drivers of a health M&A market for manufacturing facilities.
Last year, Cipla laid out $550 million to buy U.S.-based firms Inva Gen and Exelan Pharma, to get a U.S. footprint. In August, India’s Piramal Enterprises added to its North American operations with a deal worth up to $52.95 million for Ash Stevens, a Detroit-area CDMO known for its work with high potency anti-cancer agents and other highly potent therapeutics. It got 60,000 square feet of facilities, with 8 chemical drug development and production laboratories and half a dozen full-scale production areas.
- here’s the Actavis announcement
- here’s the Teva announcement
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