Polpharma launches €270mn bid for Romania's Biofarm in central European consolidation push

Polpharma, Poland's largest pharmaceutical group, has agreed to launch a voluntary public tender offer for Romanian drugmaker Biofarm at a valuation of approximately €270mn, marking one of the most significant cross-border consolidation moves in the central and eastern European pharmaceutical sector in recent years.

The Gdańsk-headquartered group, formally Zakłady Farmaceutyczne Polpharma, is offering 1.379 lei per share for the Bucharest-listed company, a roughly 12 per cent premium to the prevailing market price and around 15 per cent above the level at which Biofarm traded shortly before the announcement. The total transaction value comes to approximately 1.36bn lei, or about €270mn, across Biofarm's 985.4mn outstanding shares. The launch of the offer remains conditional on the approval of Romania's Financial Supervisory Authority.

The deal has been substantially de-risked at the outset by binding commitments from Biofarm's two principal shareholders. Longshield Investment Group, the former SIF Muntenia, holds 51.68 per cent of the company and Lion Capital, the former SIF Banat-Crișana, holds 36.75 per cent — taking the two together to 88.4 per cent of the share capital. Both have signed an implementation agreement with Polpharma committing to tender all of their shares. Separately, Longshield has indicated it will request a general meeting to approve the distribution of a special dividend of 0.140263 lei per share before the offer is launched.

The acquisition would mark a strategic step in Polpharma's long-stated ambition to consolidate its position across south-eastern Europe. The Polish group is the largest pharmaceutical producer in its home market and one of the largest generics manufacturers in Central and Eastern Europe, generating annual revenues of more than €1.1bn, employing over 5,600 staff and producing some 400mn packs of medicines a year. Its broader portfolio spans more than 600 products, sold in over 40 countries, and the group operates manufacturing and development sites in Poland and Kazakhstan, with additional subsidiaries in Spain, Germany and Switzerland. Polpharma is controlled by Jerzy Starak, the Polish billionaire who acquired the company during the 2000 privatisation process and has spent the past two decades transforming it from a domestic generics producer into a regional pharmaceutical force.

For Biofarm, the bid represents the most consequential corporate event in the company's modern history. Founded in 1921, the Bucharest-based group is one of Romania's most established producers of soft gelatin capsules, oral solutions and tablets, with a portfolio of more than 100 brands. Its best-known consumer products — Carmol, Triferment, Colebil, Bixtonim, Cavit and Anghirol — are entrenched in the Romanian over-the-counter market and have export reach across Hungary, Moldova, the Caucasus and parts of central Asia. The company sits comfortably within the top ten participants in the Romanian pharmaceutical market by units sold, and operates two manufacturing facilities in Bucharest alongside a testing and product development unit.

The financial profile underpinning the offer is steady rather than spectacular. Biofarm reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of 92.5mn lei, marginally below the 95.1mn lei recorded a year earlier, with net profit broadly flat at 32.5mn lei. Full-year 2025 net profit of 100.8mn lei was, however, 35 per cent ahead of 2024, suggesting a degree of operational momentum that Polpharma will be looking to scale once integrated. Total assets stood at 676.7mn lei at the end of March, up 6.3 per cent from year-end, while total liabilities rose 8.3 per cent to 95.9mn lei. The shares had already climbed 90 per cent over the preceding twelve months and 53 per cent over the past six, indicating that the market had been at least partly anticipating corporate activity in the name.

The strategic logic for Polpharma is straightforward. Romania, with a population of around 19 million and rising healthcare spending, is one of the larger pharmaceutical markets in the region but remains structurally fragmented at the producer level. Biofarm — modern, profitable, with strong consumer healthcare brands and a recently upgraded manufacturing base — is the kind of asset that allows a buyer to acquire scale, distribution and brand equity in one transaction, without the integration complexities of a larger or more diversified target. The deal also gives Polpharma a meaningful platform from which to push its own portfolio into the Romanian market and across the wider Balkan and Black Sea regions.

The broader regional context is also relevant. Central European pharmaceutical consolidation has accelerated in recent years, with regional generics producers seeking to build sufficient scale to compete against larger Western European groups and to defend against pricing pressure from Indian and Chinese manufacturers. The exit of Romania's former state investment funds — both Longshield and Lion Capital are successors to entities created during the country's 1990s privatisation programme — also continues a longer-running theme of legacy domestic shareholders gradually divesting strategic stakes to international industrial buyers.

For Romania, the deal will provoke familiar debates about foreign ownership of strategic industrial assets, particularly in pharmaceuticals — a sector that successive crises, from Covid-19 onwards, have positioned as a matter of national resilience. The transaction's progress through the Financial Supervisory Authority, and any political response that emerges, will be watched closely as a marker of how the country is balancing capital market openness against the impulse to retain domestic ownership of significant industrial producers.