Shire Pharmaceuticals and BioChem Pharma announce $4 billion merger

UK-based Shire Pharmaceuticals Group and Canada's BioChem Pharma haveentered into an agreement to merge. This will be effected through an exchange of shares which values each BioChem share (on the basis of Shire's current American Deposit Share price) at $37 and the Canadian company as a whole at approximately $4 billion on a fully-diluted basis. The merger is expected to close in the second quarter of 2001, subject to approval of both firm's shareholders and regulatory review.

A few weeks back, it was being strongly rumored that BioChem was set to merge with a US biotechnology company (Marketletter November 27), at which time MedImmune was named as the likely suitor.

The two companies say that the merger will create "a leading specialty pharmaceutical group with pro forma revenues for the year ended December 31, 1999, of around $587 million and pro forma net income of some $146 million. Moreover, it will also broaden and enhance the product portfolio of the partners, with leading positions in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and HIV, and deepen the project pipeline, with BioChem's early-stage projects complementing those at a later stage at Shire, they claim.