Few events are bigger in the world of corporate health care than JPMorgan Chase’s annual conference in San Francisco. And this year, much of the buzz seems to surround the prospect of more deals.
More than a few major drug makers have mentioned a desire to pursue takeovers this year to help add new products, according to news reports.
Such attitudes have been prevalent in the health care industry for some time. The sector has been one of the busier areas of focus for deal makers, as drug makers look to refill their product pipelines, and service providers look to gain scale and move into complementary businesses.
Health care transactions comprised about 8.5 percent of deals announced globally last year, according to Thomson Reuters.
Among the potential buyers is Bristol-Myers Squibb, whose chief financial officer told Bloomberg News that the company remains interested in buying new drugs, despite disappointing returns on the nearly $8 billion it’s spent on deals over the past three years. This time, it will look more to drugs in the earlier stages of testing.
Here’s what Charles Bancroft, Bristol-Myers’ chief financial officer, told the news service:
“We have to take bets sometimes,†Bancroft said. “A really good company shows they can be adaptable and flexible to the environment they find themselves in at any given time.â€
Teva Pharmaceuticals also spoke of looking to deals as a growth strategy once more, after taking a sabbatical from being one of the most merger-focused pharmaceutical companies.
From Bloomberg’s account of comments by Eyal Desheh, Teva’s chief financial officer:
“We have to do the clever deals that Teva was so good at doing in the past,†Chief Financial Officer Eyal Desheh said yesterday at a JPMorgan Chase & Co. health-care conference in San Francisco. “The ones that you can buy one and one and get to two, I know it’s a cliché. But we’re very good at doing that. And I think that these are the kind of deals that we’ll be looking at in the future.â€
And Covidien, the medical device maker that was spun off from Tyco, said that it plans to use its free cash flow for strategic acquisitions, according to a transcription of comments by Joe Almeida, the company’s chairman and chief executive.
More from Mr. Almeida’s presentation:
Covidien has the preference of spending money and acquisitions that will deliver strategically and financially to our shareholders. And it is important to understand that the acquisition world is very opportunistic and any time the Covidien has cash sitting in its balance sheet will not sit there for long.
