Quintiles, IMS Health merge

Quintiles and IMS Health have merged to form Quintiles IMS Holdings, effectively creating one of the world’s largest healthcare information portfolios.

The announcement follows a banner quarter for Quintiles in which the company saw an 8.4% constant currency service revenue growth compared to the first quarter of 2015.

Todd Casper, VP Investor Relations at Quintiles, explained that while decisions on several large opportunities slipped into second quarter, April resulted in the largest dollar value of new business the company has seen since it went public. “Our important product development business is preforming well with a strong product pipeline,” he added.

Specifically, growth in product development netted new business totaling $799m in the quarter which ended March 31, 2016.

Our pipeline is the largest in overall dollar amounts operating that we’ve seen,” said Tom Pike, Quintiles CEO. “It’s the largest one that we’ve had since we’ve been public …I would expect it’s the largest one we’ve ever had.”

He explained that the pipeline, which contains more than 5,300 compounds in phase I clinical research, presents a “nice mixture” of large and small opportunities.

Kevin Gordon, Quintiles COO, added that that company’s pipeline is strong in all areas. “We feel very good about the size of the pipeline, the breadth and diversity of the customers included in that,” he added.

The company also expressed its intent to continue investing growth in its global delivery network via its new facility in Mumbai.

Quintiles IMS Holdings

While IHS saw declining revenues recently due to unfavorable foreign exchange, cancelations in commercial services in 2015, as well as lower new business addition in Japan, the equity market capitalization of the joined companies is more than $17.6bn and the enterprise value is more than $23bn.

According to Quintiles, the newly formed company will “enable differentiation” in the CRO market.

If we can demonstrate the fact that we can get to investigators and patient in a different way I think it’s an incredibly powerful combination,” said Pike, adding that the deal with primarily involve leveraging the businesses that both companies currently have, “and being more effective in them.”

We don’t have to do much to our solution except power them up with each other’s capabilities to really drive the benefits,” he said. “If we execute well … and both organizations are known for strong execution, we should really be able to drive higher win rates.”