Bavarian Nordic urges investors to accept takeover offer

Bavarian Nordic has repeated a recommendation that its shareholders accept a takeover offer from an investment consortium, saying updated terms are "fair and attractive."

The Danish biopharma company said that the bid on the table from Innosera ApS – a group led by private equity firms Nordic Capital and Permira – has now been raised to DKK 250 ($39) per share after an earlier offer was turned down by some of its shareholders.

Holdouts include pension fund ATP, which is the largest shareholder in the vaccine specialist, along with two smaller backers, Industriens Pension and AkademikerPension.

ATP – which reportedly lost no time in rejecting the improved bid – was also the first to turn down Innosera's earlier DKK 233 offer that valued the business at around $3 billion. That was tabled in the summer and expired yesterday, and by the deadline, only around a quarter of shareholders had accepted the deal.

Previously, the pension fund has said that the price of the offer does not reflect the company's value under its current strategy, and it wants to remain a long-term investor.

With the deadline for the new offer approaching on 5th November, the board of Bavarian Nordic issued another statement this morning, with chairman Luc Debruyne saying: "Following the extension of the offer period and the increased offer price, the board of directors maintains its recommendation to shareholders to accept the offer…based on our view of the company's fundamental value and in the light of the share price level over a longer period prior to the consortium's takeover bid being made public."

Debruyne has said that in recent years Bavarian Nordic has received several enquiries about a takeover but has never actively sought to sell the company, which sells and distributes a variety of vaccines, including recently FDA-approved chikungunya shot Vimkunya. The latest offer is the first to be brought with concrete terms.

The board has weighed up whether the company could deliver value to shareholders better independently or after a sale, and has concluded that the Innosera offer "is attractive for both shareholders and the future growth and value of Bavarian Nordic," according to Debruyne, and can "accelerate the current growth strategy."

The consortium "has the ambition to ensure the business reaches a scale that can compete with larger vaccine companies and create a more balanced portfolio," for example, with targeted acquisitions that will require significant added capital, he added.

At the moment, Bavarian Nordic focuses mainly on travel vaccines and distributes some shots on behalf of partners in some countries.

The company, which is currently listed on the Nasdaq Copenhagen board, will be taken private if the deal goes through. Shares had risen just under 3% to DKK 237 at the time of writing.