Teva closes in on sale of API business TAPI

[Credit: JHVEPhoto/Shutterstock.com].

The road ahead for Teva’s active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) business has become a little clearer, with the company confirming it is in “advanced discussions” about TAPI’s sale.

The Israel-headquartered pharma company initially mooted the idea of TAPI becoming a standalone business back in 2023, overhauling its leadership with the appointment of Dr R Ananthanarayanan as CEO.

That plan was initiated with the aim of giving Teva a “more focused end-to-end operation” with Dr Ananthanarayanan, who’d previously led Teva’s API and biologics operations for the four years to 2018, returning to take charge.

That was followed by Teva’s decision in January 2024 to divest the TAPI business altogether and it has been up for sale ever since.

Commenting on the decision at the time, Teva’s President and CEO Richard Francis said TAPI’s divestiture would play an important role the company’s Pivot to Growth strategy.

“It will allow us to increase the focus on our core business, continue to invest in our growth drivers, accelerate our innovative and biosimilar pipeline, and position our generics portfolio and pipeline to drive growth for the future.”

Now that advanced talks about that sale have begun, Teva said it would provide a final update alongside its upcoming Q3 results. However, it cautioned that “issues remain, and there is no certainty that a deal will be reached”.

TAPI’s fortunes have fluctuated since its planned divestment was announced, with the API business recording an 11 percent year-on-year drop in sales to $135 million in the second quarter of this year.

The company said that performance was “mainly due to lower demand and timing of shipments” and previous quarters had generally seen single-digit growth. In this year’s Q1 TAPI’s sales rose two percent to $130 million, 2024’s Q4 sales were flat at $145 million, and they were up six percent to $229 million in 2024’s Q3.

Teva’s planned sale of its TAPI business comes amid a ramping up of pressure from the US for pharma to increase its domestic API production and API investments from Lilly in Virginia and Texas and from AbbVie in Illinois.

Even before this year’s hardening of an America-first economic agenda from the US, Teva had previously issued multiple warnings over risks to API manufacturing in Europe.