Top Healthcare Analyst: A $400 Billion AstraZeneca-Bristol Myers Deal Could “Cut Costs in a Big Way” Quick Read – BMY’s existing $2B cost-savings program and discounted forward P/E of ~10 make it an attractive AZN acquisition target, Holz argues. – Eli Lilly’s $1 trillion market…
p dwarfs all pharma rivals, pushing companies like Merck to pursue deals ahead of looming patent cliffs. – Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and AstraZeneca didn’t make the cut. Grab the names FREE today
Mizuho Securities healthcare sector specialist Jared Holz laid out the case for a potential blockbuster pharmaceutical tie-up on CNBC Monday morning, arguing that reported talks for AstraZeneca to acquire Bristol Myers Squibb could make financial sense if the buyer aggressively cuts the combined company’s cost base. The Billions in Cost Cuts a Deal Could Unlock Holz framed the logic bluntly. “If you take these two companies and you slash expenses, that would be the main thing here. You cut costs in a big way, and you basically aggregate these assets.
It’s not totally unreasonable,” he said. He extended the point to the target’s R&D value: “If AstraZeneca thinks that Bristol’s assets, their R&D pipeline, is at all decent and there’s a lot of costs they can cut, it’s not unreasonable.” AstraZeneca (NASDAQ:AZN) traded around $157.23 on Monday, August 3, carrying a market cap of roughly $263 billion. Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE:BMY) traded around $64.79 on Monday, with a market cap of about $132 billion.