While there was some hope in late 2016 that embattled specialty pharma rollup (which has since become a rolldown) Valeant would sell its Salix stomach-drug business to Takeda, that speculation first fizzled in late November, and then was summarily eliminated when Taked announced yesterday it would buy Ariad for $5.2 billion, instead. So grappling with a massive debt load, Valeant had no choice but to seek the disposition of other “non-core” assets.
Overnight it did just that when Valeant agreed to sell $2.1 billion in assets to get cash to reduce its staggering debt burden, and earlier today the Canadian drugmaker revealed L’Oreal SA will pay Valeant $1.3 billion for three skin-care brands. Earlier in the day, Valeant said it would sell its Dendreon Pharmaceuticals unit to closely held Chinese conglomerate Sanpower Group Co. for about $820 million.
“With this sale, we are better aligning our product portfolio with Valeant’s new operating strategy by exiting the urological oncology business, which is one of our non-core assets,” Valeant Chief Executive Joseph Papa said in a statement on Monday. The deals could be the first of a series of divestitures for Valeant, whose growth was fueled by an acquisition spree that left it saddled with a huge pile of debt.
L’Oreal said the three brands would stand alongside the likes of Vichy and La Roche-Posay in its Active Cosmetics division, which is among its strongest in terms of growth and resilience to slowdowns in consumer spending in the past three to four years. L’Oreal paid nearly eight times the brand’s combined annual revenue of $168 million as it expands into one of the fastest growing areas of the beauty industry.
As Bloomberg adds, the agreements mark a start to Valeant’s efforts to pay down about $30 billion in debt, even if doing so means also shedding cash-flow generating businesses, and thus cutting the company’s potential growth upside. The Laval, Quebec-based company has been embroiled in scandals about its drugs’ high prices and accounting that led to legal and regulatory investigations along with declines in its share price. The company’s U.S. shares jumped 13 percent to $17.36 at 6 a.m. New York time in trading before U.S. exchanges opened.
“The valuation is pretty high; this is a decent price” that Valeant is getting for the skin-care brands, said Rudi van Den Eynde, who helps oversee about $1 billion in assets at Candriam Investors Group, including L’Oreal shares.
Proceeds from both sales will be used to permanently repay term-loan debt under Valeant’s senior credit facility, the company said. The Sanpower transaction is expected to close in the first half of this year, while the sale to L’Oreal should close in the first quarter, according to Valeant.
While Valeant’s motive to sell business was obvious, L’Oreal agreed to pay a high price for the Valeant brands, CerAve, AcneFree and Ambi, to challenge rival Nestle SA in the medicated skin-care industry, said Pierre Tegner, an analyst at Natixis in Paris. Skin care is the largest category in the cosmetics industry, accounting for more than one-third of the global market, according to data tracker MarketResearch.com. The three brands have combined annual sales of about $168 million and will become part of L’Oreal’s Active Cosmetics Division, alongside La Roche-Posay, Vichy and SkinCeuticals, the buyer said.
“What we can see all over the world, including in the U.S., is that there’s a huge trend in using medicated skin care,” Brigitte Liberman, president of the L’Oreal division, said in an interview. “People want to be reassured by what they’re using in terms of skin care, and something developed with a health-care professional is key to reassure the consumer.”
The Sanpower transaction, meantime, gives the Chinese company control over Provenge, an immunotherapy treatment for prostate cancer that is the unit’s only commercialized medicine. Buying Provenge will put Sanpower at the “cutting edge of the global precision medicine industry,” it said. Valeant bought Dendreon out of bankruptcy in 2015 for $445 million and is selling it at a premium to that price, which is “pretty good in our view,” Irina Koffler, an analyst at Mizuho Securities USA Inc., wrote in a report. She has an underperform rating on Valeant shares.
Started by its chairman Yuan Yafei in 1993, Sanpower owns five listed companies in China including a department store operator and several electronics makers. Real estate development, investment funds and senior-care providers are among its business ventures. A deal spree has also given it many foreign assets including Britain’s House of Fraser department-store chain.
While the sales may buy Valeant some additional time, they will only cement its low stock price, as hopes of a sudden rebound fade increasingly. Through Monday, Valeant’s U.S. shares had plunged 94 percent from their 2015 peak, cutting the company’s market value to $5.2 billion. Last year the company cut its financial forecast three times, was investigated by law enforcement and said that sales of a key product were falling.
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