2023-05-17 12:20:31
BarcelonaEntry of foreign capital into the Catalan pharmaceutical company Esteve. The parent, Grupo Esteve Lifesciences, has sold 26% of the company’s capital to the German private investment fund Lubea. With this operation, pending final approval by the European authorities, the Esteve family will continue to be the majority shareholder, with 74% of the property.
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“Lubea’s entry is extremely important for the company’s growth strategy. Now we have money, the strategy has not changed and it also means that there is an experienced institution that sees our business, likes it and he wants to enter,” explained Esteve’s CEO, Staffan Schüberg, at a press conference this Wednesday. Entry into the fund seeks to provide pharmaceuticals with the financial strength necessary to take risks in product development.
The entry of Lubea is extremely important for the company’s growth strategy”
Staffan Schuberg CEO
The pharmaceutical company had been looking for the entry of an investor for some time, a process that Schüberg explained that they did not want to take lightly because they did not want an entry of capital for the short term, but with a 20-year vision . The capital injection of the German fund will lead to the entry of independent members to the board of directors. Regarding an eventual IPO through a public offer of shares, Schüberg has assured that “it is very likely but not in the immediate future”.
The Esteve family owns Grupo Esteve Lifesciences – which has now reduced its stake in Esteve Healthcare to 74% – and also Corporación-Farmacéutica Esteve, which also owns 50% of Esteve Teijin, 50% of Isdin and 15% of Hangzou Jiuyuan Gene Engineering. Three months ago, Esteve Healthcare split off from Corporación-Farmacéutica Esteve, which had 100% of the capital, to allow new investors to enter.
15% increase in income
Esteve Healthcare raised revenues by 15% in 2022, to 644 million euros, and closed the year with an attributable net result of 78 million euros, five times more than the 14 million in 2021. For the on the other hand, Isdin entered 436 million, Esteve Teijin 33 and Hangzou Jiuyuan Gene Engineering, 160 million euros.
The company’s net financial debt is 7 million euros. Throughout the year, Esteve allocated 26 million euros in capital investments (Capex), a figure that will remain at 23 million this year and that will reach 75 million in the cumulative period from 2024 to 2026.
In the first quarter, Esteve bought a factory in Lliçà de Vall from the Uquifa group, which has allowed the company to increase its production capacity of active pharmaceutical ingredients by 20%. In the first months of last year, the firm launched Seglentis – a drug resulting from its own research – in the United States for the treatment of acute pain in adults.
The pharmaceutical company has 1,824 workers, most of them in Spain, after increasing the workforce by 16% last year, and its medicines have reached seven million people worldwide.
Inflow of foreign capital
Another Catalan pharmaceutical company, Uriach, made a similar move at the end of last year with the opening of a competitive process to give its capital to venture capital funds to buy a minority stake in the group, according to move forward Expansion. And in mid-2022, the Italian group Italfarmaco bought the Catalan pharmaceutical company Lacer – known for its toothpaste and over-the-counter products, such as Thrombocid or Talquistina.
These two operations in the sector are more isolated cases of a practice that became a trend in 2018, when the Catalan companies Cirsa, Freixenet, Cellnex and Abertis passed into hands from outside the Principality.
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