In a quiet year for takeouts, who was buying?

Plenty has been written about big pharma’s retreat from the buyout market last year, but not so much about what the other end of the sector was up to. A deep dive into Evaluate Pharma’s M&A data reveals that, while many large biopharmas stayed at home, small groups went shopping.

Both the volume of takeovers and spend by small and mid-sized developers hit at least a five-year high in 2021. The sums involved at this end of the M&A market are usually inconsequential compared with the big caps’ firepower, but this was not the case last year.