Medical couple and
butcher's boy win big from Actelion sale
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[January 26, 2017]
By John Miller
ZURICH
(Reuters) - The 70-year-old son of a Swiss butcher is among the biggest
beneficiaries of Johnson & Johnson's $30 billion takeover of Actelion,
Europe's biggest biotech company.
For Rudolf Maag, whose 5.1 percent Actelion stake is worth more than
$1.5 billion, this is the second time in five years that deep-pocketed
J&J's craving for Swiss medical companies has made him rich.
Back in 2012, the U.S. healthcare giant bought Maag's 15 percent stake
in device maker Synthes Stratec in a takeover, making him a billionaire.
The biggest European pharma deal in 13 years will also enrich Actelion
Chief Executive Jean-Paul Clozel and his wife, Martine, the doctors who
founded the company in 1997 and owned 5.03 percent of shares, according
to the 2015 annual report.
Other winners include BlackRock, which according to a SIX Swiss Exchange
filing from December owns 5.2 percent of Actelion, and billionaire U.S.
hedge fund manager Dan Och, whose Och-Ziff Capital Management Group
amassed nearly 3.2 percent now worth nearly $1 billion in a stake
announced before Christmas.
European biotechnology has long been a poor relation to the far bigger
industry in the United States, but the Clozels broke the mould in
developing a fully fledged and profitable business.
At Actelion they built molecules they first worked on while employees at
Swiss drug giant Roche into what became the blockbuster Tracleer for
treating deadly pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH).
With the announcement of J&J's takeover after more than two months of
negotiations, other owners of Actelion are cheering, too.
"The structure is very attractive," said Eleanor Taylor Jolidon, a fund
manager at Union Bancaire Privee in Geneva, a top-40 Actelion investor.
The relative weakness of Europe's biotechnology sector, despite the
region's strong academic science base, has been blamed on factors such
as lack of entrepreneurial spirit and inadequate funding.
Under the Clozels' leadership, Actelion overcome those obstacles, with
the husband-and-wife team's stubborn determination to market on their
own Tracleer and follow-on drugs Opsumit and Uptravi, expected to
generate more than $4 billion in combined annual revenue.
Clozel will remain in the biotech game as CEO of the new R&D business
that is being spun out of Actelion under the deal. The new company will
be listed and is likely to be valued at around 1-2 billion Swiss francs
($1-2 billion), according to analysts at Berenberg.
[to top of second column] |
Johnson & Johnson Vice President and Worldwide Chairman
Pharmaceuticals Joaquin Duato attends a news conference at Actelion
headquarters in Allschwil, Switzerland January 26, 2017. REUTERS/Arnd
Wiegmann
Its
operation will include experimental drugs from Actelion's laboratories against a
range of conditions, including insomnia, severe hypertension and dangerous
narrowing of blood vessels associated with brain hemorrhage.
J&J, which will control up to 32 percent of the new company along with Actelion
investors who get a share for each Actelion share, also gets Tracleer, Opsumit,
Uptravi and other drugs already on the market, plus rights to an experimental
multiple sclerosis drug and an investigational antibiotic.
'HUGE DEAL'
As CEO, the 61-year-old Jean-Paul Clozel has insisted in the past on the
company's independence, fending off a hostile approach in 2011 from U.S.-based
activist fund Elliott Advisers which sought to wrest control of the board in
order to put Actelion up for sale.
At the
time, Maag departed from his traditionally low-profile approach by publicly
coming to Clozel's aid, joining those who thought Elliott was low-balling
Actelion's value and defending the company's stand-alone strategy.
When the familiar face of J&J, with its lucrative offer, arrived on the scene,
however, there was no repeat of the defense.
In an email to Reuters in December, Maag declined comment on Actelion's future
and he did not respond to inquiries on Thursday seeking comment on the J&J deal.
While Maag was a longtime investor, billionaire Och's big Actelion stake emerged
in December as talk of a sale heated up and a flurry of hedge funds piled into
Actelion shares on optimism that J&J's offer would be too big for the Clozels to
refuse.
"If I can get a premium, I like to take it," said Urs Beck, fund manager at EFG
Asset Management. "It's a huge deal."
(Additional reporting by Silke Koltrowitz in; Zurich and Ben Hirschler in
London; editing by Anna Willard)
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