Illumina-Grail decision sees the European Union lean in to "innovation"

MLex Market Insight

News

4.9 • 9 Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2022

⏱️ 15 minutes

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Summary

In a decision that ricocheted around the world this month, the European Commission announced it had blocked the $8 billion Illumina-Grail merger. Arguing that Illumina’s acquisition of Grail, a cancer-testing company, would stifle innovation, Commissioner Margrethe Vestager appeared to be harking back to a theory of harm that was the talk of the town back in the late 2010s, when the Dow-Dupont and Bayer-Monsanto deals were making headlines. More importantly, though, the European Commission’s decision leaves the EU out of sync with the US, where a court has overturned a regulator’s attempt to block the deal.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Today the Commission has prohibited the acquisition of Grail by Illumna.
0:17.7	And that was the voice of EU Competition Commissioner Magretta Vestaya earlier this month,
0:22.4	announcing the regulator's decision to block Illumina's $8 billion US dollar acquisition
0:27.4	of cancer testing company Grail. It was a decision that reverberated around the world,
0:33.4	one that exposed fissures between the EU and the US regulatory landscape.
0:38.3	And that's a topic of conversation for today's edition of Emlexers Weekly podcast.
0:43.3	I'm your host, James Panicki, a senior editor with our Asia-Pacific team.
0:48.3	And regular listeners of this podcast know how significant this deal has been for the EU regulator. The very fact that it reviewed the deal at all was at the time newsworthy.
0:59.2	Then came Vestia's decision to shut it down despite contradictory developments in the US. Well, what does it all mean and where does it go from here?
1:08.5	Natalie McNeilis covers M&A and antitrust from our offices in Brussels,
1:13.2	and I'm delighted to say that she's with me right now.
1:16.3	So Nat, we last talked about this in July.
1:18.8	So much has happened since then,
1:21.0	so please can you bring us up to date?
1:23.1	Yes, okay.
1:23.7	So the last time we talked,
1:25.5	Illumina had just lost a major case in the European court.
1:30.1	And yeah, so much more has happened since then.
1:32.8	We've been joking around Emlex that this case is like a soap opera or a Netflix thriller or something
1:37.3	because it has a cliffhanger at the end of each episode.
1:40.1	Okay, well give us the elevator pitch for that Netflix thriller.
1:44.0	What's it all about?
	...

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