TPG Capital In $2B Deal For Immucor

Private equity group TPG Capital will take diagnostics firm Immucor Inc. private in a near $2 billion deal that could give the company’s niche blood-testing products a more global profile. Immucor has been seen as a potential target because of its unique technology that automates the identification of blood types—a process that was earlier done manually.

The deal follows a flurry of private equity-backed acquisitions, which have risen about 42 percent this year from a year ago, according to sister news service Reuters.

“Immucor has done a great job of automating the blood typing process and bringing in latest technologies to what used to be a manual process,” Avondale Partners analyst Daniel Owczarski said. “There is some competition but nothing that has been able to slow them down.”

The 30-year-old company makes and sells reagents used by hospital blood banks, laboratories and blood donor centers to detect and identify certain properties such as blood type and antigens of human blood before transfusion.

Immucor shareholders will receive $27 in cash for each share they own, representing a premium of 30 percent to the stock’s closing price on the day before the deal was announced. “It seems like a real nice premium. Don’t expect a bidding war to break out and it is a win for shareholders,” Avondale’s Owczarski said.

The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2011. The agreement has a go-shop provision that allows Immucor to seek better offers through August 15, the company said in a statement.

The Immucor deal marks the second big acquisition by TPG, which manages around $48 billion, in the health sector in less than a year. Last July, TPG and The Carlyle Group had won the bidding for Australia’s Healthscope Ltd for $1.73 billion.

Recent deals in the sector include Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.’s $2.38 billion buyout of Pfizer’s Capsugel unit, Warburg Pincus‘s $438 million deal with ambulatory services provider Rural/Metro Corp. and Clayton, Dubilier & Rice‘s $3 billion takeover of Emergency Medical Services.

Goldman Sachs acted as financial adviser to Immucor, while Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Securities advised TPG. Citi and JP Morgan have also provided fully committed financing to TPG.

(Esha Dey is a correspondent for Reuters in Bangalore.)