NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) — Canadian biomarker company Miraculins has withdrawn its offer to acquire diagnostics developer IBEX technologies.
In mid-November Winnipeg-based Miraculins made an unsolicited offer to acquire IBEX through a stock deal that would exchange one common Miraculins share for five shares in IBEX.
At the time, Montreal-based IBEX said the offer appeared to undervalue its worth, saying it had three times the holdings of Miraculins, and that Miraculins’ shares had dropped more than 100 percent since the beginning of the year.
Today, Miraculins President Jim Charlton said “we were disappointed with the response received from IBEX's Board of Directors and have made the decision not to proceed with formalization of the offer at this time.”
Beyond the scuttle over valuation, which would leave Miraculins shareholders with 77 percent of the company and IBEX owners holding 23 percent, IBEX also was concerned about how the two companies’ technologies would be developed together.
As IBEX CEO Paul Baer told GenomeWeb News at the time of the original offer, “I think [Miraculins has] … undervalued our company … and we don’t understand how they propose to develop our technology with the resources they have.”
Baer said then that IBEX’s board would look more closely at the offer, but he suggested that it looked like an unlikely merger. “If their value was good, if their technology was good, if they were a well-traded stock it might be different,” he said.