Takeover bid is being completed – Japanese company acquires Calliditas

At the end of May this year the Japanese conglomerate Asahi Kasei announced a takeover offer to acquire all shares in Swedish company Calliditas, which develops drugs in rare diseases.

The price, SEK 208 per share, meant that Calliditas was valued at approximately SEK 11.2 billion.

Callidita's board then unanimously recommended that the owners of the company should accept the offer from Ashai Kasei.

“In this global market that we live in, it is an advantage to be part of a larger company with greater resources and capital that can really invest in and run different activities. The fact that they want to build a global business in kidney diseases and other autoimmune diseases means that there will be resources for development projects”, Callidita's CEO Renée Aguiar-Lucander told Dagens Industri.

Asahi has now announced that it controls 93.3 percent of the shares in Calliditas, which enables the compulsory redemption of the remaining shares.

The acceptance deadline for remaining shareholders is extended to September 13. An extraordinary general meeting has been called for September 30.

In the public takeover offer, Asahi Kasei declared that it had not made any decisions about changes to Callidita's operations, location, management or employees, including their terms of employment.

"In order to realize efficiencies, however, the integration of Asahi Kasei and Calliditas will entail certain changes regarding the merged group's organization, operations and employees," the Japanese company wrote at the time.

Callididats Therapeutics was founded in 2004, then under the name Pharmalink, and has its headquarters in Stockholm. The company develops drugs for, among other things, the treatment of the hereditary kidney disease Alport syndrome and the kidney disease primary immunoglobin A nephropathy (IgAN).

The company's drug Tarpeyo (budesonide) for treatment of IgAN was granted full approval in the US by the US Food and Drug Administration, FDA, at the end of last year.