Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Sanofi's first bid of €47 ($56) billion, on February 17, was rejected by Aventis's board as too low (Nat. Biotechnol.22, 259–262, 2004). The second, successful offer will cost Sanofi €54 ($64) billion in a combination of cash and shares. The price on Aventis is estimated to be a 30% premium on its average share price in the month before the takeover was launched. In return, Sanofi must now impose an ambitious and drastic restructuring on Aventis to save €1.6 ($1.9) billion on the operation of the merged company. And judging from comments made by Sanofi's CEO Jean-Francois Dehecq, Aventis' heavily biotech-oriented R&D effort is the number-one target for cost cutting (see Table 1).
“Sanofi has been very clear that they want to aggressively transform Aventis' R&D,” says Denise Anderson head of life sciences research at independent brokerage firm Kepler Equities (Zurich). “They haven't been very specific on how they will proceed, but we expect that, privately, they have a pretty clear idea.” According to Claude Allary, managing partner at biotech and pharma advisory services firm Bionest (Paris), “the merged company will be revisiting a lot of these collaborations, particularly the Aventis ones of which there are far more than on the Sanofi side,” he says. Allary believes the cost of the acquisition, and the promises to speedily integrate the two companies, means Sanofi will rapidly divert clinical development resources into support of its late-stage programs.