MILAN (Reuters) -Italian drugmaker Angelini Pharma is keen on M&A, even after its offer to buy bigger rival Recordati fell through despite having the support of potential financial partners, its Chief Executive Sergio Marullo di Condojanni said on Tuesday
Media speculation over Recordati’s future rose in the second half of last year, after majority shareholder CVC Capital Partners hired investment banks JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs to explore options for the drugmaker.
Some reports named Angelini Pharma as a potential buyer of CVC’s 51.8% stake in Recordati, but the private equity firm in January said had not had talks with Angelini’s managers or shareholders and did not foresee any.
“It would have been a very big operation for us, as Recordati has a market cap of over 10 billion euros ($10.78 billion). There was a lot of interest from financial partners with whom we could have bought a controlling stake,” Marullo di Condojanni said on the sidelines of conference in Milan.
From Angelini’s point of view, the offer was “very convincing,” he said. “Perhaps we could have let it go earlier but we were very persistent,” he added.
Marullo di Condojanni said his group was still interested in M&A deals in Italy, where he said small, profitable players had no incentive to grow, meaning there was a lack of companies of sufficient scale to invest in innovation.
($1 = 0.9273 euros)
(Reporting by Elvira Pollina, writing by Gianluca Semeraro, editing by Barbara Lewis)
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