FINANCE
Taking a look back , three mergers and acquisitions from the healthcare industry stand out from the rest as the most expensive of all time .
At a total end price of $ 72.4 billion , the merger resulted in GlaxoSmithKline . This year , the company applied for regulatory approval for the first vaccine against malaria .
3 . GlaxoSmithKline – $ 72.4 Billion In January of 2000 , UK pharmaceutical companies Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham announced that they would be merging their operations , but it was not until December of that year that the merger was completed .
2 . Sanofi-Aventis – $ 73.5 Billion In the year 2004 , sales of pharmaceutical products worldwide came to $ 550 billion leading to companies seeing the need to expand . Sanofi-Synthelabo made a takeover bid worth $ 60.5 billion for Aventis early in the year but the French company rejected the bid feeling it was too low .
20 November 2014