KKR-backed Panasonic Healthcare agreed on Wednesday to buy Bayer Diabetes Care for 1 billion $1.1 billion in a rare example of a foreign private equity group and a Japanese company jointly making a large overseas acquisition.
The deal illustrates the global ambitions of Japanese companies, which are increasingly accessing cheap domestic financing to snap up overseas assets.
Bayer Diabetes Care, a unit of German pharmaceutical giant Bayer, provides blood glucose monitoring systems to people with diabetes and healthcare professionals. Both companies had already been in partnership, with Bayer Diabetes Care marketing and selling Panasonic Healthcare products around the world for more than two decades.
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