Industry & Business

Dublin-based clinical research group Venn Life Sciences is to acquire Kinesis Pharma for a total consideration of up to €6.5 million.
The company aims to raise £3.75 million through a placing of shares, to part fund the acquisition of Netherlands-based Kinesis Pharma.
Venn will initially pay €3.6 million for Kinesis, a provider of specialist consultancy services around the chemical-pharmaceutical, non-clinical and early clinical development of drug products. This will be made up of €2 million in cash and €1.6 million in shares.
A further €2.9 million could also be paid, based on future performance.
Kinesis Pharma has approximately 60 employees in the Netherlands and a presence in Singapore. In the year ended 31 December 2014, it reported revenues of €5.9 million and EBITDA of €600,000.
Venn chief executive Tony Richardson said the drug development industry is now addressing potential efficacy and safety issues much earlier in the development cycle as a means to save cost and time.
“The acquisition of Kinesis Pharma enhances our offering in this early stage development arena, allowing us to establish relationships earlier and enabling enhanced cross selling of downstream services,” he said.
“This deal with allow us to provide a highly specialised more complete service offering, establishing Venn as a highly differentiated European contract research organisation,” he added.
Venn also published interim results today, reporting revenues of €4.29 million for the first half of the year, up 182 per cent from €1.5 million during the first six months of last year.
The AIM-listed Irish company said the significant improvement in the reported operating results was largely driven by continued revenue growth and improved project margins due to greater efficiency in resource utilisation and project management.
“We announced two significant contract wins with clients in this sector during the first half of the year for €2 million and €4.1 million respectively. Combined with other client wins during this period we secured a total of €9 million of new contracts during the six months ended 30 June 2015,” Venn chairman David Evans said.
The company narrowed its EBITDA loss from €0.91 million in the first half of last year, to €0.04 million this year.
It is also moving closer to break-even, with the loss before tax narrowing to €259,000 from €987,000 in the first half of 2014.