Pharma BD Deal Intelligence

Danaher Corporation / GE Life Sciences Biopharma Business (now Cytiva)

2019 · Asset Purchase · $21.4B · Complete

CALLED IT — OFF BY 16
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Top 25 largest deals of the 2010s

Ranks computed across 828 graded deals (Critic + Outcome Score both present).

The coverage arc

Feb 25, 2019 PR Newswire Neutral

Danaher Corporation announced a definitive agreement to purchase GE Life Sciences Biopharma division for approximately $21.4 billion in cash, a business…

Apr 01, 2020 Bioprocess International Bullish

Cytiva rises as Danaher completes $21 billion deal, the largest ever acquisition in the bioprocess space, adding the biopharma business unit of GE Healthcare.

May 06, 2020 Danaher Corporation 10-Q Neutral

Danaher Corporation 10-Q filing reporting the completion of its acquisition of the Biopharma business of GE Healthcare Life Sciences.

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Danaher acquired the Biopharma business of GE Healthcare Life Sciences for $21.4 billion (announced Feb 25, 2019; closed March 31, 2020), the largest acquisition in bioprocessing history. The business was rebranded as Cytiva and became a standalone operating company within Danaher's Life Sciences segment, with ~$3.3 billion in revenue and nearly 7,000 employees at close. To satisfy FTC regulatory conditions, Danaher divested certain affinity/ion-exchange resin, chromatography hardware, biomolecular-characterization and tangential-flow-filtration businesses to Sartorius AG; that sale completed April 30, 2020 for approximately $825 million. The picks-and-shovels thesis has since been validated: in September 2022 Danaher announced merging Cytiva with Pall Corporation's life-sciences business to form a single Biotechnology Group (~$8.5 billion combined revenue, ~$7.5 billion of it bioprocessing), completed in 2023. Cytiva revenue roughly doubled from $3.3 billion to ~$6 billion within a few years of close, and Cytiva tooling now supports the large majority of global monoclonal-antibody manufacturing.

Key facts

Related deals — scored

DealYearValueOutcome
Danaher Corporation / GE Life Sciences Biopharma Business (now Cytiva) (this deal)2019$21.4B76
Danaher Corporation / Pall Corporation2015$13.6B77
Danaher Corporation / Abcam PLC2023$5.7B77
Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. / Life Technologies Corporation2013$15.1B84
Merck KGaA / Sigma-Aldrich Corporation2014$17.0B80
Becton, Dickinson and Company / C.R. Bard Inc.2017$24.0B77
Johnson & Johnson / Synthes Inc.2011$19.7B77

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