It was late on Thursday, 22 April 2004, and Jean-Francois Dehecq, chief executive officer (CEO) of Sanofi-Synthe Laboratories (Sanofi), France's second-largest pharmaceutical company, was sitting in his office thinking about what happened for the past three months. January 26, 2004 he took hostile bid tender for Aventis, the largest pharmaceutical company in France. Sanofi Aventis and merger would create the third largest pharmaceutical company in the world, closing the gap with the U.S. and British Pfizer GlaxoSmith-Kline (GSK). Jean-Francois Dehecq offered 48.6 billion, but the proposal was rejected by the Supervisory Board of Aventis. Since late January, Aventis was fighting back by launching a poison pill and invites Novartis, the largest pharmaceutical company in Switzerland, as a white knight.
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by Barbara S. Petitt Source: Thunderbird School of Global Management 27 pages. Publication Date: October 27, 2005. Prod. #: TB0105-PDF-ENG
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