Deals and Financings
After two years as a private company, 3SBio of Shenyang filed to IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (see story). According to media reports, the company will complete a $400-$500 million initial offering in Q2. 3SBio was taken private in 2013 by its CEO, Lou Jing, and CITIC Private Equity for $370 million. Although the company remains dependent upon revenues from its two mainstay products, EPIAO and TPIAO, 3SBio has been an active dealmaker, and it now has a pipeline of 20 products in development, of which 14 are being developed as China Class I New Drugs.
Shanghai Fosun Pharma (SHA: 600196; HK: 02196; OTC: SFOSF) is rumored to be in talks to acquire Lumenis Ltd. (NSDQ: LMNS), an Israeli medical device company (see story). Fosun is reportedly willing to pay $480 million for Lumenis, which makes laser, pulsed light and RF frequency devices for aesthetic uses as well as other minimally invasive procedures. In 2013, Fosun paid $240 million for another Israeli aesthetic device company, Alma Lasers. According to reports, Fosun plans to merge the two companies into one.
WuXi PharmaTech (NYSE: WX) has borrowed $165 million from a consortium of banks in Asia to expand into new businesses (see story). As one project for the capital, WuXi wants to extend its recently acquired personalized medicine diagnostic capabilities to hospitals in China. Currently, WuXi is spending $340 million in already announced major cap-ex projects (2014-16), and it has spent $100 million to acquire genomics companies in the last six months. On September 30, 2014, it reported cash of $381 million.
Rainbow Medical, an Israeli medical device incubator, raised $25 million from China investors and opened a Shanghai office that is tasked with promoting strategic collaborations in China (see story). At present, Rainbow is developing a portfolio of 12 medical device companies, each of which sprung from a device invented by Yossi Gross, one of Rainbow’s co-founders. Between 1990 and 2007, Mr. Gross launched 27 medical device companies based on his inventions.
