Nordic Healthcare & Life Sciences sector reaches highest deal activity over the last 6 years, with increasing appetite from private equity companies and public buyers looking to consolidate smaller clinics to create larger medical provider chains.

The Nordic Healthcare & Life Sciences sector continues strong M&A activity in H1’22 with deal volume up c. 4% from the record breaking H1’21 and significantly higher than previous years. Public buyers are the main driver in the Healthcare & Life Sciences space together with an increasing private equity appetite illustrated by a new high within platform investments and add-ons accounting for 39% of all transactions in H1’22. The Medical Providers segment is targeted in 3 out of 10 platform investments, whereof more than one third of these transactions involve companies working with Long-term care. The most active strategic buyer country, both public and private, is Sweden accounting for 37% of all strategic transactions, followed by Finland (20%), Norway (9%) and The US (8%). Financial sponsored buyers are often located in Denmark, accounting for 11% of these deals only exceeded by Sweden.

Key insights:

• 84 transactions were recorded during H1’2022, which is slightly above the volume as of H1’2021 (#81) and up c. 22% compared to H2’2021. Most transactions were recorded in the Medical Providers segment.
• 39% of H1’2022 transaction had PE-involvement, up from 35% in 2021 and significantly higher than the PE-involvement in 2017 (23%) and 2018 (26%). The increase in PE-involvement is the first since 2019-2020.
• Big consolidators continue to acquire smaller clinics to create larger medical provider chains within e.g., primary care, dental care, and long-term care. PE-firms are also backing leading providers in this space.
• We have seen a couple of headline deals during the first half-year of 2022: 1) Triton (UK) adds to their presence in the Nordic Medical Providers segment with the acquisition of Esperi Care (FI), 2) Axcel (DK) announced the acquisition of the Swedish dental care provider Oral Care AB (SWE) from Accent Equity, 3) Cochlear (AUS) acquired Oticon Medical (DK) from Demant for c. EUR 114m.
• PE platform investments tend to target the segments Medical Providers, Pharmaceuticals & Life Sciences and Medical Products & Services, accounting for 7 out of 10 deals involving new platform investments.
• The Publicly listed Pharmaceuticals & Life Sciences companies are experiencing the highest EV / NTM EBITDA valuation multiples (22.2x) on their rolling 3-month average together with Medical Products & Services (18.2x) and Health Care IT companies’ (17.1x), while Medical Providers trade at significantly lower multiples (7.5x).

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