This is taking stock with Kathleen Hayes and grim Box on Bloomberg Radio, heart valves, pacemakers, catheters. Did they go together with pharmaceuticals, nutritional items and contact lenses? Well they do now because Abbott Laboratories has agreed to buy the heart device makers St Jude Medical for five billion dollars. Here to tell us more about the sector of the world economy, Sasha domuni are Bloomberg Healthcare report of twenty five billion dollars. You know that that used to be
considered a lot of money. Sasha tell us why is this such a good and important deal for Abbott Labs. It's a transformational deal for Abbott And if you think about today. In fact, today has been very exciting on the M and A front, and healthcare in particular. It's been a forty billion dollar M and A day. So Abbott obviously has been the biggest contributor to the day. Uh, it was a good time for Abbott to come in for this acquisition St Jude. I've been covering healthcare for
thirteen fourteen years. St Jude has been a perennial target every single year to the point where you think you know what this company is never going to be acquired, so they get acquired. The valuation if you if you look at where they're trading at right now, around seventy nine per share, the valuation is in line to what
it was in July last year. So it would probably seem that the deals are happening because the valuations are down in healthcare and that's biotech, medical devices, life science tools, all those companies. So we're starting to see executives think, you know what, I don't think we're going to get back to the July level. So this valuation is the new norm. So billion today, it could have been thirty
to thirty five billion last year in a deal. And the share price is down a little bit today, yes, so if you think about the acquisition, the shares are If you think about Abbott, the shares are down about eight point eight percent, and there's been some scrutiny around uh the deal in terms of St. Jude's sluggish grow So it's been sluggish and in recent revenue growth performance, they've been concerns about the path to top line re acceleration.
And then obviously Abbott getting in on Cardiac where the management that's been pretty flat so that's kind of putting a few people off. They're still going to do the A Layer deal. It's it seems so, I mean, they've reassured that five I mean, as I said, billion dollars used to be a lot of money. I guess five point eight billion doesn't count for all they can do exactly. They they've said they're committed to the deal, even though
obviously the DJ is still poking around there. Obviously going back to the sales how how A Layer conducted itself on the sales front. So there they seem very much committed to that. So way in on Santa fees a big deal and uh more more billions of dollars offered on the table. This is an interesting situation because Metivation is partnered with Estellus on Astandi, which is their top
selling drug, their top selling prodect cancer drug. And people are thinking, well, hey, you know, there's a clause that says if if there's an unsolicited bid on Metivation, then then a Stellist stand still goes away. So does a Stellis come in It would make sense for their pipeline. People are also asking, come on, you know, this bid is seen as quite low relative to what metivations valuation
should be. So there may be other people, other parties interested here, So no, if you no doubt, may go up into the sixty range on their potential offer, but they started at a range that they had probably put down about two weeks ago when they approached metivation. Now they just made this public um, this offer public today. Sasha Domoni, thank you so very much. Our first word healthcare reporter here at Bloomberg News