Recently, Japan's largest pharmaceutical company Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited ("Takeda") announced to buy Irish drug maker Shire for about £46 billion (about 7 trillion yen). This buyout will become the biggest acquisition case in the history of Japanese enterprises and will also help Japan crack into the world's top ten largest pharmaceutical enterprises by virtue of a sales size of over 3 trillion yen.

The board of directors of Shire Pharmaceuticals Ireland Ltd. ("Shire") formally approved this acquisition project on May 8. After the acquisition, Shire will opt out of the London stock market and Takeda will reissue shares of the same amount. The acquisition plan is expected to be completed in the first half of 2019.

In terms of the sales volume of pharmaceutical enterprises in the world, Takeda is ranked 18th and Shire 19th. But after the acquisition, Takeda will take 9th place and see a significant expansion in market scale, becoming a real world-class pharmaceutical company. According to relevant reports, Shire has many patented drugs in the field of rare diseases such as hemophilia and hereditary-gene-related difficult and complicated diseases, and about 75% of its new drugs under development are to cure rare diseases. Therefore, this successful acquisition will help Takeda shorten the research and development time, and will improve its research and development ability and economic benefits in the long run.

In recent years, because the domestic market is very saturated, many Japanese enterprises wanting further development start to eye international market and make a concentrated effort on acquisition. To acquire Shire, Takeda borrowed half of the acquisition funds from banks. Some analysis points out that in the near future, this acquisition will put some pressure on the operation of the enterprise, but in the long run, the development of the world pharmaceutical market will bring greater opportunities to the enterprise.

Source: Economic Daily   Release Date: 2018-05-14