International law firm Clifford Chance has advised SYNLAB, Europe’s leading medical laboratory and diagnostic services company, and its majority shareholders Cinven, Novo Holdings and OTPP on SYNLAB’s public offering and initial listing of the company’s shares at the Prime Standard of Frankfurt Stock Exchange
SYNLAB floated a new German holding company on the stock exchange. Prior to the IPO, the complex ownership structure of the British former parent company with hundreds of directly or indirectly invested managers therefore had to be restructured. For the first time in a German IPO, this was done by way of a highly innovative structure only after the price building phase.
SYNLAB placed new shares as part of a capital increase, raising proceeds of around EUR 400 million, which the company intends to use to repay outstanding financial liabilities. In addition, the participating investors sold shares from their holdings. The total volume of the IPO reached approximately EUR 772 million.
SYNLAB is a clinical laboratory and medical diagnostics service provider with more than 20,000 employees. Among other Services, SYNLAB offers a full range of tests, from routine analyses to special diagnostics, and was the first laboratory service provider in Europe to develop PCR corona testing on an industrial scale. For 2020, SYNLAB reported sales of over EUR 2.6 billion. Cinven has been a majority shareholder in SYNLAB since 2015; other shareholders are the Danish life science investor Novo Holdings, the Canadian pension fund Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board (OTPP), and other minority shareholders.
The SYNLAB IPO was Clifford Chance’s second European IPO for Cinven within twelve months, following the Allegro’s EUR 2.3 billion IPO, the largest European tech IPO in 2020.
Philipp Klöckner, Finance/Capital Markets partner at Clifford Chance in Frankfurt, comments: “Synlab’s IPO is setting a signal to the growing life sciences market and beyond. We are delighted to have completed for the company and its long-standing investors this highly complex and innovative IPO, which has been a key project in view of the financially strong, future-proof positioning of the company. Our international team and expertise helped make this success possible.”
The international Clifford Chance team advising SYNLAB and its majority shareholders Cinven, Novo Holdings and OTPP was led by a German team comprising partners Philipp Klöckner, George Hacket (both Finance/Capital Markets) and Markus Stephanblome (Corporate/Private Equity) (all Frankfurt). The Finance/Capital Markets team also included counsel Nico Feuerstein (Frankfurt) and Laura Scaglioni (Milan) as well as senior associates David Santoro, Andrei Manea and Elizabeth van de Sande (all Frankfurt); the advising Corporate team also comprised partners Anselm Raddatz, Frank Scholderer (Frankfurt) and Peter Dieners (Düsseldorf), of counsels Thomas Gasteyer (Frankfurt) and Ulrich Lembeck (Düsseldorf), counsel Dominik Heß (Düsseldorf), senior associates Liza Laube, Maria-Franziska Röntsch, Annette Röhder, Gerd Hegele (all Frankfurt) and Caroline Giesen (Düsseldorf) as well as associates Annika Ascher, Thomas Conradi (both Munich), Daniel Gutmann, Lara Stelmach, Iliana Diedrich (all Frankfurt) and Yannick Niedergethmann (Düsseldorf); partner Christine Gärtner advised on supervisory board and governance matters; on employment law, partner Stefan Simon advised with counsel Christopher Fischer (all Frankfurt) as well as senior associates Mario Maier and Ines Marin (both Munich); partner Claudia Milbradt and associate Judith Dany (both Düsseldorf) advised on IP matters; partners Heiner Hugger and David Pasewaldt as well as counsel Gerson Raiser and associate Pedram Karami (all Frankfurt) advised on due diligence matters.
Advisors from Clifford Chance’s European offices in Germany as well as Madrid, Milan, London, Luxembourg and Paris advised on the transaction.
