TRENTON, N.J. — Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. on Thursday reiterated its $60-per-share offer for ImClone Systems, avoiding a bidding war for now, even though the biotechnology company has said a secret suitor is offering $10 a share more.
The drugmaker, which has a partnership with ImClone to sell its only product, the cancer drug Erbitux, also said it won’t agree to any changes in its long-term marketing rights for the blockbuster drug.
Bristol-Myers gets 61 percent of Erbitux’s U.S. and Canadian sales, or roughly one-quarter of global sales, which totaled $1.35 billion last year and could approach $2 billion this year.
The statements from Bristol-Myers, which owns 17 percent of ImClone shares, came a day after ImClone said it is considering a buyout offer worth $70 per share from an unidentified large pharmaceutical company. That would amount to about $6.1 billion.
ImClone on Wednesday also formally rejected the July 31 offer from Bristol-Myers — about $4.5 billion for the 83 percent of ImClone it doesn’t already own.
“We were disappointed to learn yesterday, nearly six weeks after we announced our offer, that ImClone’s special committee unilaterally rejected our offer without discussing its merits with us and our advisors,” James N. Cornelius, Bristol-Myers chief executive, wrote in a letter to ImClone’s board of directors.
ImClone said Wednesday that chairman Carl Icahn has been in talks with the chief executive of the unidentified suitor, who will have two weeks to examine ImClone’s finances.
Bristol-Myers, in the letter Thursday, stressed that it has no need for such examination, that its offer requires no financing and that its board has already approved the potential acquisition.
