The best offer received by the shareholders of drugmaker Terapia for the company amounts to 46 million dollars, sources close to the transaction say. The winner has not been named yet, although the deadline for bid submitting expired two weeks ago. According to the quoted sources, the companies willing to acquire the Romanian company are Egis (Hungary) and Pharmaco (Iceland). The two firms were joined by two financial consortia: one comprising Global Finance and AIG New Europe Fund and the other coordinated by a Greek investment fund.
"We bid for Terapia, but we were notified last week that another bidder had outpriced us. They are now in talks with that other bidder," Sindri Sindrason, Pharmaco general manager told Ziarul Financiar. Pharmaco is a medium-size Iceland-based group, which has enforced a clear expansion strategy in Central and Eastern Europe in the past few years. Pharmaco last year bought a drug plant in Serbia, owns three factories in Bulgaria and was prepared to enter the Romanian market by purchasing Terapia.
The two financial consortia last week received the same notification as Pharmaco, the above-mentioned sources say.
Global Finance is a Greek company managing two investment funds and had teamed up with the world's largest financial group (AIG) in the attempt to buy Terapia and merge it with Sicomed Bucharest after two or three years. Global Finance owns one third of Venoma Holdings, the investment vehicle that holds 58.08% in Sicomed Bucharest.
A Sicomed-Terapia merger would have created a player with 10% market share, which could have challenged the leading position of British group GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). GSK accounts for 11.5% of the Romanian drug market, estimated last year at 540 million dollars.
As Pharmaco and the two financial consortia are out, this leaves only one name in the game: Egis, Hungary's second largest drugmaker. French group Servier holds the main stake in Egis.
The French have also expanded to Central and Eastern Europe (mainly Hungary, Russia and Poland) in the last few years and attempted to buy Antibiotice Iasi to enter the Romanian market. However, the Romanian company is still state-owned.
After the Antibiotice deal fell through, Servier decided Terapia was also worth a try and submitted a bid through Egis. "We cannot comment on any information regarding Terapia," says Laszlo Csan, Egis corporate affairs director.
Terapia shares soared after the bid submitting deadline (January 31), gaining 15%. The latest price for Terapia is 4,650 ROL/share, which pushes the company's market capitalisation to 43.4 million dollars.
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