Travel Day -- Off The Grid All Afternoon -- Final Merial Bids Due Soon

Heading for points east across the pond this afternoon, so if the J&J arbitration is concluded, I'll miss the first wave of coverage. Yikes; oh well.

In the mean time, though, the German edition of The Financial Times (quoted by Bloomberg) is indicating that the final, sealed divestiture bids, on perhaps $1.2 billion of the Sanofi-Merck Merial assets, being required by antitrust regulations (and regulators) in the US, Japan, Australia and Europe, are due by month's end:

. . . .Final bids for animal health assets being sold by Sanofi-Aventis SA and Merck & Co. are due by the end of January, Financial Times Deutschland reported, citing people close to the transaction who were not named.

Novartis AG, Bayer AG and Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH are among the drugmakers vying for the assets being sold, the newspaper said. . . .

I'd almost certainly add Abbott and Fort Dodge/Pfizer to that list. Of course, I cannot resist re-running the companion animal graphic of a few months back -- which also reminds us that much of this is a legacy Schering-Plough/legacy Organon business.

Be excellent to one another.