Pfizer Inc. claimed the pharmaceutical industry’s latest big prize Monday, beating out a group of rivals after months of jockeying to buy Medivation Inc. and its blockbuster cancer drug for $14 billion.
Left behind was French drugmaker Sanofi, whose aggressive and at one point hostile pursuit of Medivation helped open up the process to Pfizer, Gilead Sciences Inc. and others that were said to be involved. Pfizer will pay $81.50 a share in cash, the companies said in a statement on Monday, well above Sanofi’s initial $52.50 a share offer.
By acquiring Medivation, Pfizer gets Xtandi, a cancer drug that’s already approved for sale in the US and elsewhere, and that analysts project will generate $1.33 billion in annual sales for Medivation by 2020. Pfizer chief executive officer Ian Read said in May that he was more interested in acquiring late-stage assets because the company already had plenty of early-stage drugs in the works. Pfizer, which walked away from an about $160-billion merger with Allergan Plc in April, is open to other deals, the CEO said on a conference call Monday.
Shares of Medivation, which closed at $67.16 on Friday, climbed 20 percent to $80.42 at 1:24 p.m. Pfizer declined 0.5 percent at $34.80, while Sanofi was down 0.2 percent to 69.56 euros in Paris.