Second Quarter Health Care M&A Spending Tanks

It’s still early yet, but we can say with confidence that the second quarter of 2015 doesn’t hold a candle to last year’s second quarter, at least dollar-wise. Last year, deal volume and value hit all-time highs for all previous Q2s, coming in at 325 deals and $135.8 billion in spending on those deals. This year, deal volume was fairly steady at 312 (remember, these are preliminary figures for Q2:15) but deal value plummeted 60% to $54.2 billion. We’ll have more details in the July issue of Health Care M&A News, but in the meantime, here are the biggest deals of Q2:15.  Read More »

Five Biggest Healthcare Deals in May 2015

The last week of May slowed to a crawl as far as announced health care transactions, but preliminary totals for deal volume and value indicate that May 2015 wasn’t too shabby. As of May 29, we counted 101 healthcare transactions, with a combined total of $32.4 billion. A year ago, there were 109 M&A announcements, for a total of $27.5 billion. We’ll go into detail in the June issue of Health Care M&A News, so watch for the publication announcement later this week.  Read More »

Alexion Bets Big on Rare Diseases

It was another busy week for pharmaceutical deals, but Alexion (NASDAQ: ALXN) took the prize for biggest deal with its $8.4 billion acquisition of Synageva BioPharma Corp., a privately held pharma company specializing in treatments for rare diseases. Alexion touted the fact that Synageva’s pipeline complements its own and the combined company will be one of the most robust rare disease pipelines, with more than 30 diverse pre-clinical programs. The price consists of $115 in cash and 0.6581 ALXN shares for each share of Synageva, implying a total per-share value of $230, based on the nine-day volume-weighted average closing price of Alexion stock through May 5, 2015. Read More »

Busy Year for Billion-Dollar Health Care Deals

Last week we noted that April was a slow month for healthcare deals. Then we checked our database, DealSearchOnline.com, and discovered there have been 19 billion-dollar deal announcements already in 2015, through May 8th, with a combined total of $103.6 billion. The total for the entire year is about to top $120 billion, on 487 transactions. That’s not on track to beat 2014, yet. Read More »