Earlier this week Reuters reported that the contract manufacturing organisation (CMO) has asked investment banks Carnegie and SEB to advise it on a potential 2.5bn crown ($383m) flotation citing “four people familiar with the matter” as its source.
Sadly, we are not familiar with the unnamed sources with whom Reuters is clearly very familiar, so we could not ask them for more details. Instead, we decided to ask Recipharm about the rumours directly.
A spokesman for the Jordbro, Sweden-headquartered contractor told us that: “We have previously considered an IPO but no decision is made if and when we will do this in the future.”
Last year another Reuters report suggested that Recipharm had called in UBS to advise it on a plan to sell part of its business, however, this again was based on comments from an unnamed “source close to the process.”
Neither of the Swedish banks named in the latest Reuters article responded to requests for further information.
According to the latest available figures Recipharm had sales of 2.1bn crowns in 2012 and EBITDA of 281m. The CMO employs 1,600 people.
Recipharm has made a number of investments of late, the most recent of which being the Eur32m it spent to increase lyophilisation capacity at its facility in Wasserberg, Germany.
The firm also recently partnered with Astimex Pharma in a bid to sell a generic infectious disease treatment it developed in-house.