GE Completes BioPharma Sale to Danaher, Receives $20 Billion Net Cash Proceeds

GE announced the completion of the sale of its BioPharma business to Danaher on Tuesday. The company received approximately $20 billion in net cash proceeds.
Calling the sale “a critical milestone” in GE’s multiyear transformation, GE Chairman and CEO H. Lawrence Culp Jr. said the deal fortified the company’s “considerable sources to de-risk our balance sheet and continue to solidify our financial position.”

“I am proud of the teams for completing this transaction amidst a great deal of global change,” Culp said. “As we go forward, GE retains one of the world’s leading healthcare companies, using our global scale and technical leadership to deliver better outcomes and more capacity to a world striving for precision health.”

Under the terms of the transaction agreement, GE received a total consideration of $21.4 billion, including approximately $21 billion in cash and Danaher’s assumption of certain pension liabilities. After accounting for taxes and fees in the deal, and factored receivable balances, net proceeds to GE totaled about $20 billion.

GE announced the completion of the sale of its BioPharma business to Danaher on Tuesday. The company received approximately $20 billion in net cash proceeds. Top and above images credit: GE Healthcare.

Formerly part of GE Healthcare’s Life Sciences division, the BioPharma unit, now named Cytiva, manufactures equipment and materials that help pharmaceutical companies discover and mass-produce biopharmaceuticals, a class of drugs designed to fight diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis. Among other things, it’s also helping researchers explore immunotherapy, an emerging type of treatment that uses the body’s immune system to find and kill cancer and other diseases.

GE Healthcare retains a separate part of its Life Sciences business: Pharmaceutical Diagnostics, which develops contrast media used by radiologists. The unit is a global leader in pharmaceutical diagnostics for medical imaging, used in more than 90 million patient procedures each year.