Merck (MRK) CEO Ken Frazier on Thursday emphasized his company’s desire to close significant acquisition and licensing deals this year during an earnings call with investors and reporters.
“You haven’t seen the deals come through quite yet, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not very, very much engaged in active discussions with” a number of companies, he said.
The U.S.-based drug giant’s quarterly financial report fell just short of analysts’ revenue expectations despite an impressive haul from new drugs like the cancer immunotherapy blockbuster Keytruda. The slight miss was largely attributed to a difficult sales landscape for some older medications. Merck had revenues of $9.31 billion in Q1 2016, a 1.2% year-over-year drop.
During Thursday’s call, Goldman Sachs (GS) analyst Jami Rubin pressed Frazier on the possibility of upcoming deals, including the type of investigational drug candidates and companies that Merck may be interested in purchasing. She also raised the fact that biopharma M&As and valuations have cooled down significantly compared to the healthcare deal frenzy of 2014 and 2015.
Click here to subscribe to our new Brainstorm Health Daily Newsletter.
“[W]e have a strong balance sheet and we can go after deals across the whole spectrum, early, middle, and late-stage compounds,” Frazier responded.
“And we will look for those deals consistent with good science and financial discipline. So we want to be aggressive in going after deals, but we want to do deals that create value for our shareholders.” He also pointed to his firm’s 2015 acquisition of early-stage immuno-oncology company cCAM Biotherapeutics.
Frazier was also careful to note that cancer drugmakers aren’t the only targets in Merck’s crosshairs. “It’s also important for us not to be too blinded to the fact that there’s important science going on in other areas, and so what we want to look for are significant opportunities to have leading positions in growing areas of therapeutic significance going forward,” he said.
Whether or not acquisitions are the answer to plugging revenue and R&D holes is a more complicated question, as Fortune‘s Stephen Gandel points out.
