Pharma BD Deal Intelligence
Schering-Plough paid $14.5B cash for Organon, gaining fertility, contraception, and animal health franchises plus a deeper late-stage pipeline—but the deal strained Schering-Plough enough that Merck swallowed the whole company just two years later in a $41.1B reverse merger.
Organon deepened Schering-Plough's pipeline but the financial and strategic strain helped make Schering itself a takeover target — Merck absorbed the whole company just two years later
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Schering-Plough Corp will buy Organon BioSciences, the drug unit of Netherlands-based Akzo Nobel, for $14.4 billion, giving the U.S. drugmaker an array of…
FTC challenged the acquisition over overlap in animal health (poultry vaccines) and required divestitures, but cleared the broader human pharmaceutical deal.
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EUR 11B / $14.5B cash. Closed Nov 2007. Human + animal health. Source: CNBC, Fierce Biotech, AkzoNobel press release.
Organon deepened Schering-Plough's pipeline but the financial and strategic strain helped make Schering itself a takeover target — Merck absorbed the whole company just two years later
Assessment window: 15yr post-close.
Hormonal contraception and assisted reproduction are large, durable women's health categories with millions of US patients on therapy. Organon was a top-tier contraceptive franchise (NuvaRing vaginal ring, Implanon subdermal implant) and a fertility-hormone leader (Follistim/Puregon, corifollitropin alfa pipeline).
Organon's NuvaRing (etonogestrel/ethinyl estradiol) competed against Wyeth's oral contraceptives (Loestrin, Lo Ovral), Bayer's Yasmin/Yaz, Ortho-McNeil's Ortho Tri-Cyclen and Ortho Evra patch, and Merck's Implanon implant. In fertility, Follistim/Puregon (follitropin beta) competed with Serono's Gonal-F (follitropin alfa) and Ferring's Bravelle/Menopur. The deal gave Schering-Plough an instant beachhead in two new franchises — women's health and CNS — that complemented its cardiovascular (Zetia/Vytorin), respiratory, and immunology businesses with effectively zero therapeutic overlap. Late-stage CNS pipeline assets — asenapine (Saphris) for schizophrenia/bipolar and sugammadex (Bridion) for neuromuscular blockade reversal — provided pipeline depth Schering-Plough lacked, since its internal portfolio was concentrated in Phase II. Asenapine carried risk: Pfizer had walked away from a co-development partnership in 2006, raising commercial-fit concerns. Schering-Plough projected $500M annual cost synergies within three years. The deal closed November 2007 ahead of Schering-Plough's own 2009 sale to Merck, which spun the women's health business out as Organon & Co. in 2021.
| Deal | Year | Value | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Schering-Plough Corp. / Organon BioSciences N.V. (Akzo Nobel) (this deal) | 2007 | $14.5B | 48 |
| Schering-Plough Corp. / Organon International | 2007 | $14.4B | 56 |
| Schering-Plough Corp. / Organon & Co. | 2007 | $14.4B | 48 |
| Schering-Plough Corp. / NeoGenesis Pharmaceuticals | 2005 | — | 30 |
| Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. / Life Technologies Corporation | 2013 | $15.1B | 84 |
| Merck KGaA / Sigma-Aldrich Corporation | 2014 | $17.0B | 80 |
| Becton, Dickinson and Company / C.R. Bard Inc. | 2017 | $24.0B | 77 |
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