MSC to acquire Mediclinic in £3.7bn deal

London-listed private hospital group Mediclinic has accepted a £3.7 billion takeover offer from a consortium of its largest shareholder and the world's largest container shipping group (MSC). Mediclinic agreed to the £3.7bn bid in August after rejecting a £3.4bn bid from the same consortium in June.

MSC Group President Diego Aponte said: “MSC is ideally placed to provide long-term capital, as well as our insight and experience in running a global business, to support the strategic ambitions of the Mediclinic management team”. But MSC declined to elaborate on why it would expand into healthcare .

Founded in South Africa in 1984, Mediclinic is today a private healthcare company with operations in Switzerland, Namibia and the United Arab Emirates.

Worldwide, the new deal by the Aponte family, the owners of MSC, follows a trend of global giants entering the healthcare space. In the last year, the Maersk family, which owns a stake in AP Moller-Maersk, announced its foray into healthcare by acquiring Unilabs, a maker of Covid-19 tests and diagnostics company. Belgian investor Groupe Bruxelles Lambert has acquired Europe's largest imaging center, Affidea. Ping An of China holds the Peking University Medical Industry Group, including taking over the Peking University International Hospital and so on.

It is worth mentioning that Lufthansa and MSC jointly bid for the stake in Alitalia ITA Airways, and Klaus Michael Kuehne, the 33rd richest man in the world this year, has increased his stake in Lufthansa from 10% to 10%. 15%. If the bid is successful, MSC and KN will stand in the same trench at this angle.

Now that shipping companies are holding large sums of cash, the wave of grabbing core resources such as shopping logistics and medical care will continue to accelerate. Mærsk could end 2022 with at least $30 billion in cash, and while smaller rival Hapag-Lloyd's latest quarterly report disclosed holding $10 billion in cash and cash equivalents, it's conceivable that MSC also has at least $20 billion now - $25 billion minimum firepower.

This month, COSCO SHIPPING Holdings finally followed the global trend and took a milestone step, and decided to optimize the company's organizational structure and set up a supply chain logistics department and a capital operation department to further enhance its own ability to expand and supplement the chain, serve customers, and create value. . After the adjustment, COSCO SHIPPING Holdings will be positioned as a global digital supply chain operation and investment platform with container shipping as the core, providing customers with supply chain solutions of container shipping + ports + related logistics services, and is responsible for COSCO SHIPPING Group's "building a world-class company". The core company of the global integrated logistics supply chain service ecology" vision goal.

Shipping companies without integrated supply chain logistics business can only be marked with a strong cycle attribute, which is an important step in the transformation of cycle to growth.