Acquiring Deciphera Pharmaceuticals for about $2.4 billion and with it a Western sales network (2024)

Buying a body, not a product

Read this acquisition only as diversification away from a one-drug company and you are likely to miss its centre. What Ono obtained for $2.4 billion was not merely QINLOCK as a single product or vimseltinib as a candidate. A company that had been unable to get beyond Japan, Korea and Taiwan bought the body with which to sell drugs itself in the United States and Europe. When president Takino said he would “not stop short of buying whole companies,” and turned Ono into the party responsible for markets ten times the size of its own sales territories, it was an expression of intent to escape a revenue structure entrusted to licensing.

The price of acquiring that body was not small either. Operating profit for the year ended March 2025 fell from ¥159.9 billion to ¥59.7 billion under goodwill amortization and deal costs, and as the examples of Santen and Sumitomo Pharma show, self-commercialization in the West is no guaranteed road for a mid-sized company. Approval of vimseltinib in the United States and Europe would light the way ahead, but it cannot yet be said that this one transaction fills the hole that Opdivo’s patent expiry in 2031 will open. How much of the purchased asset turns into sales on top of that network — until that answer arrives, the verdict on this decision stays reserved.