Illumina (ILMN) seeks to resolve it’s battle with EU regulators regarding acquisition of biotech company Grail. Earlier this year, Illumina received a $476 million fine from EU authorities over the deal. It comes as Pfizer (PFE) says it has received all the necessary regulatory approvals for its acquisition of Seagen (SGEN). Yahoo Finance’s Anjalee Khemlani breaks down the biggest pharma stories of the day in the video above.
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Video Transcript
– I mean, we’ve been tracking this as it’s hoping to end its battle with EU antitrust regulators over its $7 billion acquisition of biotech company, Grail. And it could be any day now. Yahoo Finance’s Anjalee Khemlani has more on this story. Hey, Anj.
ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Hey, Brad. That’s right. So Illumina really looking for a way out here. It has been battling with this deal on so many fronts with the EU getting that really large fine, more than $400 million early this year. As well as internally with what happened with its leadership, we saw the fight with Carl Icahn, of course, focused on this Grail acquisition. And that’s something that has really weighed on the company.
So now, they’re in the battle with the EU waiting on that decision, looking to get through what the EU regulators are looking to do, which is to break this up apart. And this has been something that a lot of people have said could be a bad deal for the company.
So right now as it stands, really, an interesting fight, really interesting focus when you think about how much pressure pharma is under when it comes to these kinds of deals. Rare articles being used to kind of break this apart and for those reasons, for anti-competitive reasons and the like. So this is just another one of those for pharma to take on with everything that’s going on, price pressures and the like.
– Yeah. And Anjalee, we’ve certainly seen a number of deals within the pharma space over the last 12 months. And we also got some news out this morning about Pfizer’s $43 billion deal with Seagen. What do we know there?
ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Yes. So that finally got the green light from the FTC. That’s something that Pfizer had been hoping to close and plays into exactly what we were just talking about, which is within the EU as well as here in the US, the FTC taking on much more scrutiny of these deals.
So Pfizer and Seagen was just the latest example, that $43 billion deal. Amgen and Horizon had also been facing FTC scrutiny before. This is just building up the case that there are some competitive concerns out there for these companies. And Pfizer now getting that green light getting to seal the deal, and then adding to its pipeline, which is something it needs to in order to build up from some of the patent cliffs it’s facing. So that is the deal there.
– So a heck of a lot of news in your space this week to say the least. OK, Anj, thanks so much.
