“After health and virtue, there is nothing more precious in the world than knowledge.” Still having the first but having lost the second with investors this year (-2.8% for its title since 1er January), Siemens Healthineers remembered with Goethe that nothing is easier to acquire the third.
The check signed to the Swiss Novartis for the imaging tracers of the former French company AAA, at 200 million euros according to the “Financial Times”, is certainly not one of those that will change the face of the European leader in medical imaging. With 14.4 billion euros of net debt, or the equivalent of 3.6 years of EBITDA, the tenth capitalization of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, reaching “half an Airbus”, is still in the process of digesting its purchase of three years ago, that of the leader in cancer radiotherapy Varian for 14 billion. Its medium-sized acquisitions have also sometimes been disappointing, such as the billion euros invested in the mini cardiac robots of Corindus, depreciated since by a quarter.
