Bio-Techne’s parent company said today it will acquire ProteinSimple for $300 million cash, in a deal that combines the buyer’s protein kit and reagent business with the acquired company’s systems and consumables designed to simplify protein analysis workflows in both research and biologics quality control.
“This collaboration offers numerous possibilities for creating full protein analysis solutions, with an emphasis on purity and identification which will be extremely useful for our customers,” Charles R. Kummeth, Bio-Techne’s president and CEO, said in a statement.
Bio-Techne develops and manufactures purified proteins—notably cytokines and growth factors, antibodies, immunoassays and biologically active small molecule compounds. The buyer is headquartered in Minneapolis and has more than 1,000 employees worldwide.
Particularly attractive for Bio-Techne was ProteinSimple’s Simple Western family of Western blot products—the newest of which is Wes, which the buyer said can deliver 25 Western blot results in less than three hours.
ProteinSimple also provides high-throughput Western blotting instruments named Peggy Sue and Sally Sue, both designed to boost lab productivity. ProteinSimple will continue as a division of Bio-Techne to be run by Tim Harkness, the acquired company’s CEO.
Headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, ProteinSimple has more than 200 employees—more than half of whom specialize in sales and technical support—as well as manufacturing operations in Canada and sales offices in Japan and China. ProteinSimple saw its revenues jump 30% in the year that ended May 31, to $57.1 million, and recorded $7.9 million in earnings before Interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA).
“We think it reasonable to assume ProteinSimple retains a 20%+ revenue growth rate for the foreseeable future, driven off the back of its recent new product launch, Wes,” Leerink Swann concluded in a note to investors by Dan Leonard and Justin Bowers, CFA. “The acquisition should significantly accelerate [Bio-Techne’s] top-line growth and should be accretive in 2016, if not sooner.”
That growth, according to Leerink Swann, will accelerate from the mid-single-digits to high-single-digits as a result of ProteinSimple. Also attractive, Leonard and Bowers said, were the $300 million purchase price and the potential for cost-cutting: “The combination of TECH and ProteinSimple should yield revenue synergies in both directions. The businesses have significant customer overlap in biopharma and academic research.”
Bio-Techne finished the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2013 with net earnings of $112.6 million, all but flat from a year earlier, on net sales that slid 1.3% to about $311 million.
The deal is expected to close on or about July 31, subject to satisfaction of customary closing conditions—including the expiration or early termination of the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976—but not any financing contingencies. Techne said it will pay for ProteinSimple with both cash on hand and a new revolving line of credit facility that Bio-Techne is expected to obtain before the closing of the acquisition.