Abbott Laboratories to Acquire Perclose

Abbott Laboratories (Abbott Park, IL) has agreed to purchase Perclose Inc., a leading arterial closure device manufacturer based in Redwood City, CA.

Under terms of the agreement, Abbott will acquire all of Perclose's outstanding shares in a stock-for-stock merger transaction intended to be accounted for as a pooling of interests and to be tax-free. The transaction is valued at approximately $680 million and is expected to be completed by year-end, subject to the approval of Perclose's shareholders, regulatory agencies and customary closing conditions. The number of Abbott shares to be issued is designed to provide $54 worth of Abbott stock for each Perclose share, subject to a minimum of 1.10 Abbott shares and a maximum of 1.35 Abbott shares being exchanged for each share of Perclose stock.

Perclose also announced that it is beginning a voluntary, lot-specific recall of the Techstar XL 6F percutaneous vascular surgery product. The recall is due to a manufacturing process variation that led to difficulty in deploying the needles featured in Perclose's suture-based technology. The manufacturing issue has been resolved and Perclose plans to replace the recalled Techstar units with product currently in inventory.

The arterial closure market is less than five years old and represents one of the fastest growing segments of the cardiovascular device market with an annual compound growth rate of over 40%. Although there are over seven million catheterization procedures performed worldwide, less than 20% annually utilize closure devices.