Merck KGaA to buy Bio-Techne for $11.3 billion in cash

Merck KGaA said Thursday it will buy Bio-Techne for $73 a share in cash, valuing the U.S. biotech company at about $11.3 billion, or EUR 9.9 billion. The deal is Merck’s largest acquisition in more than a decade and needs regulatory approvals and Bio-Techne shareholder approval before it can close, which the companies expect by late 2026 or early 2027.

The logic is in the business Merck is buying. Bio-Techne sells multi-omics offerings, analytical technologies, integrated workflow solutions and products tied to research, bioprocessing and advanced therapeutics, putting it squarely in the life-sciences supply chain rather than the drug-discovery end of the market. Merck said the acquisition would strengthen its position across the full life science value chain, a sign it is paying for recurring tools, consumables and process technologies that support many programs at once instead of making a single bet on one experimental therapy.

That strategy fits a business that already matters inside Merck. In fiscal 2025, life science generated 42% of group sales and 40% of EBITDA pre, making the division one of the German company’s core profit engines. Bio-Techne, based in Minneapolis, generated about $1.2 billion in net sales in fiscal 2025 and had roughly 3,100 employees worldwide, giving Merck scale in a mature tools platform rather than a niche asset.

Investors quickly priced in the premium. The offer represented a 36% premium to Bio-Techne’s one-month volume-weighted average trading price, and Bio-Techne shares jumped about 20% to 22% in premarket trading after the announcement. Merck shares also rose, suggesting markets saw industrial logic in the combination even as they weighed execution risk.

Merck said it expects about EUR 140 million in annual cost synergies, fully realized by year 3 after closing. It also said the transaction should be immediately accretive to sales growth and EBITDA pre-margin after closing, with EPS accretive by year 3. Those targets will now face the usual tests of integration, regulatory review and whether the companies can fold Bio-Techne’s catalog into Merck’s broader research and manufacturing platform without disrupting customers.

The move also echoes Merck’s 2015 Sigma-Aldrich deal, a $17 billion acquisition that was the company’s biggest at the time and a landmark consolidation in global life-science tools. A decade later, Merck is again using a large takeover to reshape its position in an industry where scale, breadth and customer reach increasingly matter as much as pipeline risk.