Japan’s largest pharmaceutical group Takeda is pressing ahead with its foreign expansion with another big purchase. The buying price for the US drug manufacturer URL Pharma totals 800 million dollars plus additional payments.
URL Pharma is known as a specialist in the manufacture of gout medications. The main product of the company from Philadelphia is the gout drug Colcrys, which lately generated yearly turnovers of 430 million dollars. Altogether, URL Pharma achieved a turnover of nearly 600 million dollars in 2011.
The large takeover continues the expansion efforts of Japanese pharmaceutical groups which had lately been increasingly buying foreign pharmaceutical companies because of the stagnating domestic market. As recently as 2011, Takeda had acquired the Swiss drug manufacturer Nycomed for about 9.6 billion Euro.
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