GALEN, the Northern Ireland pharmaceuticals company which has achieved 30 years of profitable growth without any external financing is to float on the London stock market.
The listing is designed to raise about £30 million sterling in new money to finance the cost of these expansion programmes. The company will also sell a further £5 million to £10 million of existing shares.
Mr Allen McClay chairman and founder, said he intended to keep the majority of the company in private hands. Hoare Govett, which is handling the share placing, said that the company, with turnover of £31.1 million and pretax profits of £7.2 million, was valued at up to £180 million, when the new funds were raised.
Mr McClay said: "We have proved ourselves very able at coping with changing circumstances." The core of the business is an integrated pharmaceuticals company with a range of proprietary drugs and a sales force of 60 people in the UK and Ireland. Its leading products include Kapake, a painkiller, and a number of specialised sterile drips, marketed under the Ivex brand.
The company is raising new money largely to fund the rapid expansion of its Clinical Trials Supplies subsidiary which organises the packaging and distribution of new drugs used in patient trials.
Each trial presents a complex but smallscale production and logistics operation which large pharmaceutical companies are increasingly keen to outsource, analysts said.
This business now accounts for 30 per cent of turnover and has most of the 10 largest pharmaceuticals companies as clients. Galen has recently established a clinical trials operation in the US and is now setting up a chemical synthesis facility at its headquarters in Craigavon outside Belfast.
This would give it the capability to do manufacturing for clinical trials as well as packaging and distribution.
Its research and development programme is focused on designing an intravaginal ring to administer HRT hormones. Its lead product is currently in the final stages of clinical trials.
