Philips boosts its health-care business
ROYAL Philips’s $1.7 billion (R21.93bn) deal to buy Spectranetics Corporation, a US maker of devices to treat cardiac disease, shows the Dutch company is moving more aggressively to bolster its growing health-care business.
Philips would offer $38.50 a share in cash for the Colorado Springs-based company, according to a statement yesterday.
The price is 27 percent above Spectranetics’ closing level on Tuesday. Philips also will buy back as much as €1.5bn (21.76bn) of its own stock to offset share dilution from an employee incentive programme.
Philips chief executive Frans van Houten has been on the hunt for acquisitions to fuel expansion in health care, already the company’s largest business.
After spinning off a lighting division last year and selling another called Lumileds, the executive has made the market for medical equipment and services the company’s focus. Spectranetics was on Philips’s radar “for quite a while,” he said yesterday, adding that, to his knowledge, Philips was the only suitor.
“With the ongoing sell-down of light and the soon-to-be-sold majority in Lumileds, Philips is able to make the next move in its health-care strategy,” said Marcel Achterberg, an analyst at Degroof Petercam. “Acquisitions should boost the growth rate.”
Philips dropped 1.1 percent to €32.18 at 12.27pm yesterday in Amsterdam, where the company is based.
The stock has returned about 16 percent this year including dividends, compared with a 9.8 percent return for the AEX Index.
Spectranetics is growing at a double-digit percentage rate and forecasts sales this year of $293 million to $306m, according to Philips. The US company’s so-called image-guided therapy devices to clear blocked arteries provided an alternative to stents, which were metal tubes widely used in cardiac procedures, Van Houten said. One product, laser atherectomy catheters, treats blockages with laser energy, Philips said.
“This is a nascent business, one which can replace stents, which is a very large market,” Van Houten said, adding that Spectranetics was seeking approval for its catheters from the US Food and Drug Administration, following clinical trials to prove their effectiveness in treating people with coronary conditions. While paying a high price for Spectranetics, Van Houten said that he was prepared to make additional acquisitions of a similar size as part of a wider growth strategy.
Unprofitable
The purchase values the unprofitable company at about 7.2 times revenue, compared with an average multiple of 5 times for similar deals.
The US cardiac device company will add to Philips’s medical products that already include scanners and ultrasound machines.
Separately, Philips said its buyback would cover about 46.1 million shares at the current stock price.
The company aimed to balance its capital allocation among investments in growth, maintaining an efficient balance sheet and providing returns to shareholders, Van Houten said.
Both the Spectranetics deal and the buyback were planned before reports that activist hedge fund Third Point had bought Philips shares, Van Houten said.
The chief executive said he has no knowledge of the situation, and there’s been no contact with the fund.