TRENTON, New Jersey (AP) ― Germany’s Bayer plans to buy U.S.-based Merck & Co.’s consumer health business, creating a combined medicine cabinet of household names from Bayer’s aspirin to Merck’s Clarityn allergy pills.
The $14.2 billion deal announced Tuesday would vault Bayer AG atop the nonprescription medicine business across North and Latin America. It would make Bayer No. 1 worldwide in skin and gastrointestinal products, a strong No. 2 in the huge cold and allergy category, and No. 3 in pain relievers.
“We are combining two highly complementary businesses with virtually no overlap that will improve our product position over multiple categories,” Marijn Dekkers, Bayer’s CEO, said on a conference call with journalists.
Merck, widely considered the most research-driven U.S. pharmaceutical company, would divest a slow-growing business it inherited in 2009 when it bought Schering-Plough Corp. to get its experimental prescription medicines.
Packets of Clarityn allergy tablets, manufactured by Merck & Co., sit on display at a pharmacy in London. ( Bloomberg)
Bayer, which invented aspirin more than a century ago, already has a major over-the-counter division whose brands include Aleve pain reliever, Alka-Seltzer and One-A-Day vitamins. It would add Merck’s Clarityn, the Coppertone sun-care line, Dr. Scholl’s foot-care products and MiraLAX laxative.
The transaction is part of a recent surge in pharmaceutical industry deals. Some drugmakers are selling or swapping business segments to focus on areas where they have the most expertise, marketing prowess and prospects for growth, as Merck is doing. Others, like Bayer, are making acquisitions to beef up their portfolios of products or experimental drugs to boost future sales.
Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier said in January that he was evaluating options for Merck’s consumer and animal health businesses, both units without enough scale to grow quickly. On Tuesday, Merck said it would use the sale proceeds to invest in business areas with the highest growth potential and beef up its drug pipeline with “external assets.”
Merck is a different company than Merck KgaA, which is based in Darmstadt, Germany. The American company is known as MSD, for Merck, Sharp & Dohme, outside the U.S. and Canada.
The transaction, expected to close in the second half of 2014, requires regulatory approval. Bayer will borrow money to pay for the deal, which will bring it significant tax savings and about $200 million in savings on marketing and production costs by 2017.
“The extra revenue creates the synergies for us,” Dekkers said, adding that the deal “marks a major milestone on our path towards global leadership in the attractive non-prescription medicines business.”
Ana Nicholls, a health care analyst at The Economist Intelligence Unit, noted Bayer has offset price-cutting and recession in Europe with a big push into emerging markets.
“It now has a geographical reach that should allow it to take its newly acquired U.S. brands, such as Clarityn and Coppertone, and roll them out pretty much worldwide,” she added.