Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, the global leader in generic drugs, said Thursday that it had reached a deal to acquire the German generic drug maker Ratiopharm, ending a nine-month battle that had pitted it against at least two other bidders, Natasha Singer reports in The New York Times.
Teva will pay 3.6 billion euros ($5 billion) and expects to complete the transaction by the end of the year. In winning Ratiopharm, Teva topped the world’s biggest maker of brand-name drugs, Pfizer, and Actavis, a generic maker based in Iceland.