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Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC has partnered with private equity to take a minority stake in Klick Health, valuing the healthcare marketing agency that worked on this year’s Super Bowl commercial for Aspirin at almost $2.5bn.
Under the terms of the deal, GIC, one of the world’s biggest institutional investors, and healthcare-focused private equity group Linden Capital Partners will buy out a minority stake owned by rival firm GTCR, two people briefed on the matter said. Klick’s two Canadian co-founders will retain a controlling shareholding in the company.
The agreement is the latest in a string of private equity-backed healthcare deals, which has proven to be a busy sector for mergers and acquisition activity this year despite a wider slowdown in mid-market private equity transactions.
GIC and Chicago-based Linden’s deal values the Toronto-based business at nearly $2.5bn, or around 18 times earnings, which amount to more than $130mn a year, the people said. Klick confirmed the minority stake sale to the Financial Times after being approached for comment.
Founded in 1997, Klick has helped a large roster of drugmakers including pharmaceutical group Bayer and biotech Biohaven develop launch strategies and marketing campaigns for new medicines. Most recently, Klick worked on Bayer’s Super Bowl TV commercial for aspirin, which aimed to address denial among Gen Xers and millennials over heart disease.
Despite the top US health official Robert F Kennedy Jr’s expressed desire to ban pharmaceutical advertising and the chaos he has created within the Food and Drug Administration, the US medicines regulator, private equity-backed companies serving the pharmaceutical industry have been a popular target for deals.
Earlier this year, Siemens bought research and development software maker Dotmatics from private equity group Insight Partners for $5.1bn. Private equity group New Mountain Capital in April struck a $3.1bn change of control deal for Real Chemistry, another healthcare marketing group, which brought in Coller Capital as the largest shareholder.
GIC, which has about $800bn of assets under management, and Linden, which has $12.5bn of assets under management, are among the investors that have continued to be aggressive in the healthcare sector. The exit also marks yet another win for GTCR, which earlier this year agreed to sell its majority stake in Worldpay to Global Payments after owning it for less than two years.
In the first half of this year, there were a total of $67bn of healthcare deals in the Americas region, up from $58bn worth of deals in the second half of 2024. That is down, though, on the $99bn of deals in the first half of that year, according to a PwC analysis of LSEG data.
