German pharmaceutical and life sciences company Merck has sold Bangalore GeNei, a firm that develops products for biological research, back to its founder S Chandrashekaran as part of an asset purchase deal. The deal is valued at below Rs 10 crore, less than a third of its purchase price.
The $13-billion European company had acquired the unit in 2009 for about Rs 35 crore from Tamil Nadu-based Sanmar Specialty Chemicals, which had bought the business six years earlier. Merck decided to decommission activities at the site in July last year.
The decision to offload Bangalore GeNei was prompted by Merck’s acquisition of Sigma-Aldrich for $17 billion last year as part of a global deal. Chandrashekaran told ET that his company Pushkar Bioscience has acquired the manufacturing facilities of GeNei. He is associated with a range of startups in genomic, proteomic and clinical research.
“We will retain the GeNei brand and continue to supply quality reagents to customers while adding new products to expand the business beyond domestic market,” he said.
Bangalore GeNei, rebranded as GeNei, is likely to create innovative platform technologies for development and manufacture of new reagents, peptides, biopharmaceuticals and diagnostic reagents or kits. Industry executives familiar with
the matter said that the company will also focus on development of pre-clinical stage biosimilars, new molecular and protein-based diagnostics for neurological disabilities like autism.
