TWi Pharmaceuticals Inc (安成藥業) yesterday delisted its stock from the local bourse after chairman Chen Chih-ming (陳志明) acquired about 87 percent of its shares through a public tender offer.
About 2,800 shareholders had not sold their shares as of yesterday, the company said.
Chen’s Calchen Pharmaceuticals Inc (加陳國際藥業) would swap shares with shareholders at an exchange ratio of one-to-one, which would allow shareholders to gain preferred stocks of Calchen and then choose to hold them or sell them to Calchen at NT$72 per share in the next three months, Twi spokeswomen Angela Luan (欒君儀) said by telephone.
After the stock swap, Calchen would own 100 percent of TWi, making TWi a wholly owned subsidiary, Luan said.
The Chinese-language Wealth Magazine reported that Chen’s acquisition has not been without criticism, saying minority shareholders have complained that the firm’s downbeat outlook delivered to an investors’ conference in March dragged share prices down.
However, revenue performance for the first half of this year was strong and beat market estimates, as sales for June skyrocketed 96.29 percent year-on-year and cumulative sales for the first half rose 43.2 percent, the company’s data showed.
Luan defended the company’s earlier sales guidance, saying that TWi routinely shared information with investors about its applications for market approval of its drugs and expectation for revenue growth, and was not trying to hide information.
“Sometimes our forecast did not materialize, as regulators delayed reviews or decisions on drug products,” she said.
It usually takes about a year to see a firm’s revenue expand after its gains marketing approval for its drugs, she said.
The generic drug industry is in a trough, Luan said, citing Pfizer Inc’s announcement last week that its off-patent drug unit would merge with Mylan NV.
Big pharmaceutical companies prefer to conduct mergers and acquisitions when the industry is sluggish, she said.
In other developments, SynCore Biotechnology Co Ltd (杏國新藥) yesterday said it has enrolled 108 patients for its phase III clinical trials of its pancreatic cancer drug SB05PC in Taiwan and six other nations.
As it has met the requirement for the number of patients for the interim analysis, it plans to conduct the analysis by the end of this year, the company said.
It has to enroll a total of 218 patients in the trial, something it expects to complete by March next year, and then complete the trail in the fourth quarter, it said.
In those seven markets, the drug would be used as a second-line treatment in combination with gemcitabine for those who have exhausted the first-line chemotherapy treatments.
SB05PC combined with standard gemcitabine chemotherapy has produced an overall survival period of 13.7 months in the phase II trial, exceeding the 6.8 months of the standard gemcitabine chemotherapy, the company said.
It is confident of successful results in its phase III trial, it said.
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