Roche/Syntex
This article was originally published in The Gray Sheet
Executive Summary
Roche's $5.3 bil. acquisition of Syntex is completed Sept. 1 after Roche agrees to divest within a year the U.S. portion of Syntex' Syva diagnostics subsidiary. The Federal Trade Commission, which made its approval of the acquisition conditional on Roche's divestiture of Syva, said it was concerned that combining Roche and Syva's drugs of abuse testing businesses "could substantially lessen competition in" that market "or tend to create a monopoly...or enhance the likelihood of collusion in the market." Drug screening and monitoring assays are a major portion of Syva's business, which also includes infectious disease diagnostics and immunodiagnostics. Syva had sales of $212 mil. in 1993