Abbott offers EU concessions for antitrust approval of St Jude Medical acquisition
04 Nov 2016
Medical device maker Abbott Laboratories has offered concessions in order to obtain the European regulatory antitrust approval for its $25 billion proposed acquisition of St Jude Medical Inc, the European Commission (EC) yesterday said.
The concessions offered will now push review of the deal by the EC to 21 November from 9 November, the EC said.
The EC can now either accept the concessions, or conduct an in-depth investigation, which can take up to five months.
In April, Abbott struck a deal to buy medical device maker St Jude Medical for $25 billion in order strengthen its heart and neurological devices business. (See: Abbott to buy medical device maker St. Jude Medical for $25 bn) Last month, Abbott and St Jude announced that they would sell some of their medical devices worth about $1.12 billion to Japan's Terumo Corp in order to appease the EC (See:
Founded in 1976 and based in St. Paul, Minnesota, St Jude Medical, which is named after Jude the Apostle, is a medical device maker focused on six key treatment areas - heart failure, arrhythmias, vascular disease, structural heart, chronic pain, and neurological diseases.
It manufactures implantable cardioverter-defibrillators, pacemakers, electrophysiology catheters; vascular closure products; cardiac mapping and visualization systems, optical coherence tomography imaging systems; structural heart repair products, and neurostimulation devices.
It has more than 20 operations and manufacturing facilities worldwide and its products are sold in more than 100 countries.
Its major markets include the US, Europe, Latin America and Asia-Pacific, and has annual sales of around $5.6 billion.
St. Jude Medical's strong positions in heart failure devices, atrial fibrillation and cardiac rhythm management will complement Abbott's leading positions in coronary intervention and transcatheter mitral repair.
Abbott's cardiovascular device unit will have annual sales of $8.7 billion after the business are combined and will hold the No 1 or 2 positions across this market, which is expected to grow to $30 billion.