UCB Completes the Acquisition of Ra Pharmaceuticals - to Deliver Differentiated Therapies to Patients - Seite 2

Financial guidance updated - The closing of this acquisition leads to an update of UCB's 2020 financial guidance – as announced with the FY 2019 results press release on 20 February 2020.
For 2020, UCB is aiming for revenues in the range of € 5.05 – 5.15 billion thanks to the current core product growth and new patient populations being served. UCB will continue to advance its strong development pipeline to offer potential new solutions for patients and to explore complementary external opportunities. Hence, the underlying profitability, rEBITDA, in the range of 26-27% of revenue, will reflect the high R&D investment level, including the investment for the Ra Pharma pipeline. Core earnings per share are therefore now expected in the range of € 4.40 – 4.80 based on an average of 187 million shares outstanding.

The inclusion of Ra Pharma will be dilutive to UCB's mid-term earnings level due to R&D investments. As a result, the mid-term target of UCB reaching a rEBITDA ratio (to revenue) of 31% moves to 2022 from 2021 as previously guided. The acquisition is expected to be Core EPS accretive from 2024 onwards and to enable accelerated top and bottom line growth for UCB from 2024 onwards.

The updated financial guidance above does not reflect any potential impacts from the evolving COVID-19 pandemic. The company is following these developments diligently to assess the financial significance of this pandemic to UCB.

Funding

The acquisition of Ra Pharma was financed by a combination of a US$ 2.07 billion bank term loan and existing cash resources. The bank term loan had initially been arranged and underwritten by BNP Paribas Fortis and Bank of America Merrill Lynch and was successfully syndicated in November 2019.

About Ra Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Ra Pharma, now a wholly-owned subsidiary of UCB, is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company leveraging a proprietary peptide chemistry platform to develop novel therapeutics for the treatment of serious diseases caused by excessive or uncontrolled activation of the complement system, a critical component of the innate immune system. The company's ExtremeDiversity platform enables the production of synthetic macrocyclic peptides combining the diversity and specificity of antibodies with the pharmacological properties of small molecules.