Medical device mergers on pause (EvaluateMedTech)
2019 was an average year for medtech M&A. 2020, not so much.
Thanks to Thermo Fisher Scientific and Invitae, two groups brave enough to push ahead with multibillion-dollar acquisitions during a pandemic, the total value of medical device M&A announced in the first half of 2020 nudged over $15bn. This is still a distressingly low figure, however the real shock is not the value of the deals announced, but of those that have closed.
The medtech deals completed so far in 2020 have a total value of less than $2bn. This is despite mergers worth a total of more than $21bn remaining open. The Covid-19 pandemic seems to have made it harder to hammer out the legal or financial complications of closing deals than it did to conduct the negotiations in the first place.
Of course, the pandemic is not the only element at play. The largest pending deal is Stryker’s $11.5bn purchase of Wright Medical, which was announced in November but has since run into trouble with the US Federal Trade Commission and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority. Given that last December the FTC scuttled Illumina’s proposed $1.2bn acquisition of Paci...
