Nexvet Biopharma Plc (NVET) Soars After M&A With Zoetis; Records New 52-week High

Ireland-headquartered Nexvet Biopharma Public Ltd. Co (NASDAQ:NVET) on April 13 soared midday by 64.20% in heavy trading to $6.65, after entering an acquisition deal that will place Nexvet under the mothership of Zoetis for $85 million or $6.72 per share. The company broke into a new record of a 52-week high from its previous value of $6.62.

Zoetis will acquire Nexvet and take it into its pipeline of solutions for chronic pain management in dogs and cats. The deal is expected to be completed by the second half of the year. The deal valuation represents a 66% premium over Nexvet’s closing price on April 12. While the board of directors has granted approval on the deal, it is still subject to approval by Nexvet’s shareholders and the Irish High Court as well as other customary conditions.

“We are certain that Zoetis, with its leadership in R&D, high quality manufacturing, marketing excellence, global scale and strong customer relationships, is the ideal company to guide our monoclonal antibody candidates through development into commercialization,” said Dr. George Gunn, Chairman of the Board of Nexvet. “We see the integration with Zoetis as the logical next step to realize our ambition to bring groundbreaking antibody therapeutics to market.”

Nexvet Biopharma Public Ltd. Co (NASDAQ:NVET), founded in 2010 and headquartered in Tullamore, Ireland, is a biologic therapeutics company with a pipeline of monoclonal antibody (mAb) therapies being developed for companion animals in pain and other therapeutic areas.

 

didesign021/Shutterstock.com

didesign021/Shutterstock.com

What Does The Smart Money Sentiment Say?

The Smart Money retained its position of Nexvet Biopharma Public Ltd. Co (NASDAQ:NVET), quarter over quarter. We saw no change out of the 742 hedge funds that we track at Insider Monkey. Four hedge funds maintained their positions on Nexvet with shares valued at $17 million in the fourth quarter of 2016, compared to 4 hedge funds who own shares of the company valued at $18 million in the third quarter of the same year.

At Insider Monkey, we’ve developed an investment strategy that has delivered market-beating returns over the past 12 months. Our strategy identifies the 100 best-performing funds of the previous quarter from among the collection of 700+ successful funds that we track in our database, which we accomplish using our returns methodology. We then study the portfolios of those 100 funds using the latest 13F data to uncover the 30 most popular mid-cap stocks (market caps of between $1 billion and $10 billion) among them to hold until the next filing period. This strategy delivered 39.7% gains over the past 12 months and outperformed the 24.1% gain enjoyed by the S&P 500 ETFs. Our enhanced small-cap hedge fund strategy returned more than 45% over the last 12 months and outperformed SPY by more than 30 percentage points over the last 4.5 years (see details here).

The Bottom Line

Traders are flocking Nexvet Biopharma Public Ltd. Co (NASDAQ:NVET) as we witness heavy trading on Thursday after the company announced that it will be acquired by Zoetis for $85 million or $6.72 per share. For further reading, take a look at these 11 cities with the highest demand for biomedical engineers.

Follow Nexvet Biopharma Plc (NASDAQ:NVET)