Watson Pharmaceuticals

"My major business investment was about to get a second chance too. When at the airport about to depart on honeymoon to the Maldives, I was called by a former colleague, Sigurdur Oli Olafsson, who had previously been CEO of Actavis. Siggi Oli told me that his new company, US-listed Watson Pharmaceuticals, was interested in buying or merging with Actavis. He wanted to know if there was any way to achieve this in a low-key fashion, as the company was not interested in going into an auction. He said that Watson wanted to act soon, but understood from Deutsche Bank that a sale of Actavis was off the table for two years. He and his colleagues believed that a lot was going to happen in the world of generic pharmaceuticals in the following 24 months and the group had to move fast to be an acquirer instead of becoming a target."

"Actavis got over its 2008 management and operational problems and is now a good company with an excellent research and development pipeline. Its recent success has been driven by mergers and acquisitions. First, Actavis was taken over by America’s Watson Pharmaceuticals for €4.25 billion in 2012. The following year, the combined company merged with Ireland’s Warner Chilcott in a deal valued at $8.5 billion. In July 2014 it completed the acquisition of Forest Laboratories for $25 billion. Then Actavis bought Allergan, the manufacturer of Botox, for $70.5 billion, assuming the acquired company’s name. A $160 billion merger with Pfizer was abandoned and Allergan later sold its generic drugs business to Teva Pharmaceuticals for $40.5 billion before being acquired by America’s AbbVie for $63 billion in 2019. Not bad for a company that I bought at a valuation of $20 million in 1999. I originally put only $4.5 million into its privatisation when it had revenues of $100 million. By 2016, when I finalised the sale of my last remaining stake, I had made $1.1 billion from the company. But even before this, after five years in which the financial markets were effectively closed to me, the combined growth of my investments in Play and Actavis had by February 2014 made me – on paper, at least – a billionaire again."