Unlock Editor’s Digest Lock for Free
FT editor Roula Khalaf will select your favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC has partnered with Private Equity to acquire a minority stake in Klick Health and value the healthcare marketing agency that worked for around $2.5 billion for aspirin in this year’s Super Bowl commercial.
Under the terms of the transaction, GIC, one of the world’s largest institutional investors, and Linden Capital Partners, a healthcare-centric private equity group, will acquire minority stakes owned by rival company GTCR, the two who described the issue. The two Canadian co-founders of Klick retain control of the company.
The deal is the latest in a series of private equity-backed healthcare transactions, and despite a wide slowdown in middle-market private equity transactions, it has proven to be a busy sector of mergers and acquisition activities this year.
The GIC and Chicago-based Linden deal value the Toronto-based business as revenue of nearly $2.5 billion, or more than $130 million a year. Klick confirmed minority stock sales to the Financial Times after being asked to comment.
Founded in 1997, Klick supported a large roster of drug manufacturers such as drug groups Bayer and Biotech Biohaven, and developed launch strategies and marketing campaigns for new drugs. More recently, Klick has been working on Bayer’s Super Bowl TV commercial for Aspirin, which aims to address the denials of Gen Xers and Millennials over heart disease.
The US top official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has a desire to ban drug advertising and the private equity firm that serves the drug industry, a chaotic US drug regulator he created with the Food and Drug Administration, is a common target for trading.
Earlier this year, Siemens purchased research and development software maker Dotmatics from Private Equity Group Insight Partners for $5.1 billion. In April, private equity group New Mountain Capital attacked a $3.1 billion change in control transactions for Real Chemistry, another healthcare marketing group that brought Coller Capital as its biggest shareholder.
With GICs with approximately $800 million under management assets and $12.5 billion under management assets, Linden are one of the active investors in the health sector. This exit also has yet another GTCR victory. This agreed to sell the majority shares of the global payments to the global payments after owning them in less than two years earlier this year.
According to a PWC analysis of LSEG data, in the first half of this year, there were total healthcare transactions in the Americas from $58 billion worth of transactions totaling $67 billion.
