Glaxo Said to Be Among Three Bidders for Turkey’s Biofarma
GlaxoSmithKline Plc (GSK) is among three potential buyers of Turkish drugmaker Biofarma Pharmaceutical Industry Co., two people with knowledge of the matter said.
The other prospective bidders also are multinational companies, the people said yesterday, declining to be identified because the auction isn’t public. A winning bidder may be chosen within two to three months, one of the people said. Biofarma, an Istanbul-based maker of generic drugs, is valued between $600 million and $700 million, the person said.
Citi Venture Capital International, a unit of Citigroup Inc. (C), and Partners in Life Sciences bought Biofarma from its Turkish owners in 2006 and sold a stake to Greek private-equity firm Global Finance in 2007. The owners want to sell and hired JPMorgan Chase & Co. to manage the sale, the people said.
Bayer AG, Glaxo, Novartis AG (NOVN), AstraZeneca Plc (AZN) and more than 30 other international drugmakers operate in Turkey, a pharmaceutical market with $9.2 billion of sales last year, according to the website of the Istanbul-based Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association of Turkey.
Duncan Smith, a spokesman for Citigroup, and Alexandra Harrison, a spokeswoman for Glaxo, declined to comment yesterday. Biofarma Chief Executive Officer Umur Sudekan didn’t reply to an e-mailed request for comment. A JPMorgan spokeswoman declined to comment.
Abdi Ibrahim Ilac Sanayi & Ticaret, Turkey’s biggest pharmaceutical company, said last May that it was in talks with four or five drugmakers to sell as much as 40 percent of the company. Zentiva NV, a Czech drugmaker, bought 75 percent of the generic drug unit of Turkey’s Eczacibasi in 2007 for 460 million euros ($660 million.) It purchased the remaining 25 percent stake two years ago.
To contact the reporter on this story: Ercan Ersoy in Istanbul eersoy@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Benedikt Kammel at bkammel@bloomberg.net.
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