Left top to right: Mark Timney, Alex Denner, Vas Narasimhan. (The Medicines Company, Getty, AP/Endpoints News)

In a play-by-play of the $9.7B Med­Co buy­out, No­var­tis ad­mits it over­paid while of­fer­ing a huge wind­fall to ex­ecs

A month in­to his tenure at The Med­i­cines Com­pa­ny, new CEO Mark Tim­ney reached out to then-No­var­tis phar­ma chief Paul Hud­son: Any in­ter­est in a part­ner­ship?

No, Hud­son told him. Not now, at least.

Ten months lat­er, Hud­son had left to run Sanofi and No­var­tis CEO Vas Narasimhan was pay­ing $9.7 bil­lion for the one-drug biotech – the largest in the string of ac­qui­si­tions Narasimhan has signed since his 2017 ap­point­ment.

The deal was the prod­uct of an ac­tivist in­vestor and his con­tro­ver­sial part­ner work­ing through near­ly a year of cat-and-mouse ne­go­ti­a­tions to se­cure a deal with Big Phar­ma’s most ex­pan­sion­ist ex­ec­u­tive. It rep­re­sent­ed a huge bet in a car­dio­vas­cu­lar field that al­ready saw two ma­jor busts in re­cent years and brought mas­sive re­turns for two of the in­dus­try’s most eye-rais­ing names.

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