After fielding multiple takeover offers over the past month, Qiagen has instead decided to go it alone—and investors are less than pleased.
The stock price of the diagnostics developer dropped by about 25% over the Christmas holiday after the company said it would move forward with its current business plans.
In October, Qiagen announced it would reorganize itself around a 15-year partnership with Illumina and its hardware instead of continuing to develop its own next-generation sequencing instruments. That news came after the company missed its third-quarter targets and alongside the departure of its long-time CEO Peer Schatz.
Håkan Björklund, chairman of Qiagen’s supervisory board, said the company’s management decided its “ongoing transformation provides the best means for creating future value for shareholders and other stakeholders.”
Following reports in mid-November that it was being pursued by Thermo Fisher Scientific, Qiagen disclosed that it had received several “conditional, non-binding indications of interest” regarding a full acquisition of the $8 billion company.
Qiagen’s supervisory and management boards said they had held several discussions with potential suitors, but found them “not compelling.”
“We have a strong and differentiated portfolio of molecular testing solutions that provide opportunity for significant growth,” Björklund said in a statement. The stock market drop rewinds the company’s share price to about $31, near where it was before the initial reports of Thermo Fisher’s interest.
Qiagen’s new partnership with Illumina will see the Dutch diagnostics maker develop test kits for the sequencing giant’s hardware, spanning multiple disease areas. This will include companion tests to evaluate tumors for immunotherapies, based on Illumina’s TruSight Oncology assays, as well as other in vitro diagnostics for its MiSeq Dx and NextSeq 550Dx systems.
By Conor Hale
Source: Fierce Biotech
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