Private equity group Cinven CINV.UL is buying family-owned niche pharmaceuticals business Amdipharm for 367 million pounds ($590 million), it said on Monday, as part of a plan to create a much larger producer of generic drugs worth as much as 2 billion pounds ($3 billion). The aim is to merge Amdipharm with Mercury Pharma, which Cinven bought from rival private equity house HgCapital in August for 465 million pounds, and to expand the combined business. “We absolutely want to buy more products from the larger pharmaceutical companies that are looking to tidy up their portfolios,” said Cinven deal partner Supraj Rajagopalan in an telephone interview with Reuters. “I certainly could see an end business which is more than twice the size of what it is today,” Rajagopalan added. Amdipharm was created in 2002, with a shift in the focus of big drug companies away from smaller and older products giving it an opportunity to snap up “legacy products” - typically off-patent generic drugs in niche disease areas.
