Replies to post #64442 on Biotech Values

[corpstrat]

A3 Aventis French, Sanofi Italian????? (Too lazy to check. Dew will tell us)
Pharmacia originally Swedish, but maybe not by the time of the deals on this list?

A5 Chou en Lai's remark on the French Revolution: "too early to tell" might apply to the recent deals?

[DewDiligence]

Re: Quiz answers

>A1: I'd say all but no. 5, Novartis doesn't fully own Alcon yet.

Correct.

>A2: No. 2,3,6,7,9 are considered "merger of equals".<

Not bad—you got all but one. CVS-Caremark (#10) is the one you missed.

>A3: No. 6 (British & Swedish).<

AstraZeneca (#6) is the easy one. The hard one is the Monsanto deal (#9); it qualifies because Pharmacia & Upjohn had dual headquarters in the US and Sweden.

>A4: No. 1 was initially hostile.<

Correct re PFE/Warner-Lambert (#1), but you missed Sanofi-Aventis (#3).

>A5: No. 8 Boston Scientfc/Guidant<

This is the only quiz question of the five that is somewhat subjective. It’s undeniable that Guidant brought Boston Scientific many headaches; however, my vote for the deal least likely to have been made if the dealmakers could have seen the future is PFE-Pharmacia (#4). The main impetus for this colossally expensive ($60B!) deal was Celebrex, which turned out to be a much smaller commercial success than PFE expected.

Nice job. You get an A-/B+ :-)