Biotech Values

[Titan V]

Drugmakers ‘flush with cash’ and hunting for deals
https://www.ft.com/content/85711950-0088-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c5b5

For more than 36 years, pharma executives have descended on San Francisco in January for the JPMorgan healthcare conference, known as the Davos of the pharmaceuticals world, using the event as an opportunity to meet rivals and cook up deals.

This year, the pace of those discussions was more frenetic than it has been for a decade, according to lawyers and bankers who attended the meeting — and many are predicting the tentative talks will morph into a bumper crop of mergers and acquisitions in 2018.

“It’s as active a period as I can remember in many, many years, probably since before 2008,” says Mike Silver, a corporate lawyer at Hogan Lovells, who has been advising healthcare companies on deals for almost four decades.

A lot pops up after the JPMorgan conference...and then gets announced a few weeks after. So you should expect more soon,” he says.

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