GRIFOLS BUYS CONTROL OF COMPETING PLASMA MANUFACTURER

Grifols SA, a Spanish chemical and pharmaceutical giant, will buy a controlling stake in Germany’s Biotest AG for €1.6 billion, the companies announced.
Like Grifols, Biotest manufactures blood plasma products.
Grifols will pay €43 a share to acquire Biotest shares owned by Tiancheng International Investment, based in Hong Kong, which would give Grifols 89.88 percent of Biotest’s ordinary shares that carry voting rights, Reuters reported.
Tiancheng is a division of Creat Group, which has sought to unload its Biotest investment after U.S. regulators balked at the company’s expansion in the U.S., which makes up about half the world’s blood plasma market.
The regulators demanded that Creat sell Biotest’s U.S. operations before Creat would be allowed to engage in other business in the country.
Creat also is far along in discussions to sell Bio Products Laboratory, its British blood plasma subsidiary.
Together, the two sales will largely reverse the international acquisitions in the blood plasma business that Creat began in 2016.
In contrast, Grifols has been expanding through acquisitions in Asia and the U.S.
TRENDPOST: We enjoy being accurate in our forecasts, but do not always enjoy what those forecasts mean.
“Bigs getting bigger” is a long-term trend we not only forecast years ago (for example, in “Brick-and-Mortar Bounce,” 7 Dec 2017), but also foresee continuing indefinitely.
Too few politicians are concerned about this concentration of social and economic power to act, especially when Bigs lard office-holders’ re-election funds with legal bribery known as “donations.”
Change will only come about when the public acts, either by electing reform crusaders to public office or by taking to the streets to protest Bigs’ power if and when an organizing force for that movement emerges.