“Together with our 11,500 employees, my focus is on keeping Stada on a record-breaking trajectory in the second half of the year and growing faster than our competitors,” Stada Arzneimittel’s CEO, Peter Goldschmidt, said in a statement Wednesday.
As Stada Arzneimittel’s private equity owners continue to weigh their options around a potential sale or public offering, the German drugmaker gave a good indication Wednesday of exactly what it can bring to the table.Over the first six months of the year, Stada generated sales of 2.02 billion euros ($2.2 billion), growing revenues 9% compared with the same period in 2023, the company said in a release. For the same period that ended June 30, Stada grew earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization by 11% to 465.3 million euros ($515 million).All three of Stada’s business segments—consumer healthcare, generics and specialty pharma—contributed to the revenue growth, with specialty pharma delivering the biggest year-over-year change. The company also said it enjoyed a boon from its “rapidly growing” biosimilar offerings and from the launches of differentiated neurology and nephrology products.Notably, the question of whether Stada will eventually be sold—a prospect that’s been making headlines since last August— “will be decided exclusively by our owners,” the company’s CEO, Peter Goldschmidt, said in an emailed statement.He added that there is “no update” on Stada’s sales plans at this time and explained that the drugmaker’s owners, Cinven and Bain Capital, are “examining various options, including an IPO.”“Together with our 11,500 employees, my focus is on keeping Stada on a record-breaking trajectory in the second half of the year and growing faster than our competitors,” Goldschmidt added. Taking a closer look at the numbers, Stada’s specialty pharma arm grew sales 14% to 417.3 million euros ($464 million) during the first half of 2024. Stada credited the specialty pharma growth to its swelling biosimilar portfolio plus brands like the Parkinson’s disease therapy Lecigon and the orphan medicine Kinpeygo in a rare kidney disease.Elsewhere, generics sales jumped 12% to 838.2 million euros ($932 million), driven in part by the launch of the complex copycats for deep vein thrombosis, rivaroxaban and dabigatran, across multiple European countries, Stada said. Rivaroxaban is the generic of Johnson & Johnson’s Xarelto, while dabigatran is sold by Boehringer Ingelheim under the brand name Pradaxa.In its release, Stada called its generics business a “consistent and sustainable growth driver” for the company, noting that it expects to benefit from a generics launch pipeline that already covers some “80% of original medicines that will lose exclusivity over the next few years.”As for the last pillar of Stada’s business, the company’s consumer healthcare segment saw revenues climb 3% to 768.3 million euros ($854 million).Last August, Bloomberg reported that Stada’s owners, Cinven and Bain, were weighing options for the company, including a possible sale. At the time, sources close to the talks told the news service that the sale could value Stada at 10 billion euros or more. Goldschmidt last year told the German Press Agency that Cinven and Bain were conducting “initial exploratory talks” around the potential fate of the company, though he stressed that the investors were under “no pressure to sell.”More recently, Stada in April kicked off talks with potential buyers in a sale that could value the company at around 8 billion euros, Bloomberg reported at the time, citing people with knowledge of the discussions. The news outlet’s sources added that Stada’s private equity owners were also weighing a potential initial public offering.Bain and Cinven agreed to buy Stada for 5.3 billion euros in 2017. The deal gave the private equity firms control of what was one of the last independent generic drug makers in Europe.