In two deals that help Takeda move closer to its debt-lowering goal, the Japanese pharma is offloading some non-core Latin American brands to Brazil’s Hypera Pharma and just sold its old U.S. headquarters to Horizon Therapeutics.
Takeda has agreed to sell 18 branded prescriptions and consumer health drugs in Latin America to Brazil’s Hypera Pharma for $825 million, the company said Monday.
At the same time, Horizon has just paid $115 million to snatch up Takeda’s old campus in Deerfield, Illinois, as the Big Pharma relocated its U.S. operations out of the Chicago suburbs to join its newly acquired Shire in the Greater Boston region.
Key drugs wrapped in the Hypera deal include pain reliever Neosaldina, DPP-4 inhibitor Nesina for Type 2 diabetes and over-the-counter nausea med Dramin. The 18 products fall outside of Takeda’s five focus areas the company’s been highlighting since the massive Shire buyout. Together, they generated sales of $215 million in the fiscal year ended last March.
“Takeda remains firmly committed to the emerging markets and Latin America. This divestment enables us to focus our investments in these countries that center on our highly innovative medicines across gastroenterology, rare diseases, plasma-derived therapies, oncology and neuroscience,” Ricardo Marek, Takeda’s emerging markets head, said in a statement.
Upon close of the transaction, which is expected in the second half of 2020, about 300 commercial employees supporting the assets will be given the chance to join Hypera, Takeda said. After that, Takeda will continue to manufacture those products for Hypera.
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The Hypera transaction could help Takeda achieve its goal of divesting $10 billion worth of non-core assets to reduce its debt load. Over the past year or so, it has transferred Shire’s dry eye med Xiidra to Novartis for up to $5.3 billion and sold about 30 drugs in Middle East and Africa to Acino International for over $200 million. It also jettisoned a portfolio in Russia and other Commonwealth states to Germany’s Stada for $660 million, as well as its TachoSil patch to Johnson & Johnson’s Ethicon for $400 million.
For Hypera, the deal could further consolidate its status as Brazil’s leading pharma company shortly after it signed to buy Boehringer Ingelheim’s painkiller Buscopan for $319 million, according to Reuters. Rival drugmaker EMS was reportedly competing in both biddings.
Meanwhile, Irish-registered Horizon recently said it had penned a deal for Takeda’s 70-acre Deerfield campus. In its annual filing last week, the company disclosed the price tag as $115 million. In exchange for the new compound with over 650,000 square feet of office space, Horizon’s planning to sublease its legacy 160,000-square-feet U.S. headquarters in Lake Forest once the move is complete, as expected in the second half of 2020.
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This isn’t the first real estate move Takeda has undertaken to pare down the debt it incurred from the Shire acquisition. The Japanese pharma recently opened a new global headquarters in Tokyo as it said goodbye to its birthplace property in Osaka. It’s also looking to sell a $400 million Shire biologics plant in Ireland.
Ultimately, Takeda intends to lower its net debt/adjusted EBITDA ratio to 2x between 2022 to 2024. As of December, that number has arrived at 4.1x, versus 4.7x at the end of last March.