Aspen close two deals in two days

Aspen closed out one of their pending deals yesterday, from their website: Aspen concludes the acquisition of an API Business from MSD. API? Active ingredient, the manufacturing facility of the ingredients that go into the finished product. As Byron once said (quick update, he is in Colombia now, perhaps he will run into Rene (El Loco) Higuita who started off life as a striker apparently!), you need a chemistry degree sometimes to analyse the products that the company is manufacturing and selling. Of course the broader theme of getting middle income people getting richer and therefore having access to therapies that were unreachable is a major part of the investment thesis.



So the good news is that we will see the financial impact in the next financial results, basically Q2, because it was/is from 1 October. They had, as far as I can read it, fast forwarded the option to acquire "11 branded finished dosage form molecules" from MSD. The option was supposed to be exercised on the last day of this calendar year, so this looks like a fast forward, if you are a fan of that reality show!



This announcement follows one from Monday, same company and one of the pending deals too: Aspen acquires GSK brands and manufacturing site for 700 million Pounds. That is just short of 11.5 billion Rand for this deal to acquire these brands from GSK, whilst the other one (API from MSD) is worth 10 billion! 21.5 billion Rand and not finished, because if you recall when they (Aspen) released their full year numbers they gave an update on the two pending transactions that have not been completed yet. Both involve Infant Nutritional business of Nestle, one in Latin America, the other in certain Southern African territories. The Latin American business deal is expected to close on the 28th of October, the other (local) is still subject to competitions approval. Meh.


As Paul said, this is probably too much for many folks to keep up here, Aspen are doing many deals in order to grow quickly. In fact in the most recent media release about the API acquisition from MSD, the release describes Aspen as the ninth largest generic pharmaceutical company in the world. I am pretty sure that when Stephen Saad (who has too little time for Twitter) looks at that, he wants to be first. Number one. Not number 9, or not number two. Don't tell your kid that second is the best, OK, I got grilled on that last evening. First is the best. Long live the aspirations of this business and their leader, because as a shareholder you certainly will be in for a fair dose of entrepreneurial spirit there!