Astrazeneca's Aquisition of Ardea Bio-Sciences

Introduction

Every passing day more and more companies are going international in order to increase their market share and many other reasons. If the company decides to grow on their own through organic growth, it will take very long time. Therefore they adopt quicker methods, which are mergers and acquisitions.
An acquisition can be defined as “transfer of the control of operations and management from one firm (target) to another (acquirer), the former becoming a unit of the latter. While as merger is defined as “the combination of operations and management of two firms to establish a new legal entity”. (Peng and Meyer, 2011 P431)
In this paper, the acquisition studied will be of two pharmaceutical companies one based in UK called AstraZeneca plc being the acquirer and the target being an US company named Ardea.
AstraZeneca
AstraZeneca plc is headquartered in London, UK and operates in over 100 countries around the world and its innovative medicines are used by millions of patients making it one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical company. It is a global, innovation-driven biopharmaceutical business with a primary focus on the discovery, development and commercialisation of prescription medicines for cardiovascular, neuroscience, gastrointestinal, respiratory and inflammation, oncology and infectious disease.
(www.astrazeneca.com)

Ardea Bio-sciences
While as the target company Ardea is a biotechnology company based in San Diego, California, mainly focused on the development of small-molecule therapeutics for the treatment of serious diseases. Its most advanced clinical-stage product candidates include lesinurad, a selective, oral URAT1 transporter inhibitor for the chronic management of hyperuricemia in patients with gout, and BAY 86-9766, a specific inhibitor of mitogen-activated for the treatment of cancer, being developed under a global license agreement with Bayer HealthCare AG. www.ardeabio.com .
For the full year 2011, Ardea

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