In keeping with our mission to provide comprehensive advertising analysis, MediaRadar puts together a report of the most important mergers and acquisitions news each week. Stay in the loop, whether you sell advertising space or focus on business development. 

This week, Gilead takes out FortySeven, Apple acquires start-up Voysis and Infor is purchased by Koch Industries. 

Gilead is bolstered with FortySeven

The American biotechnology company, Gilead has completed an acquisition of Forty Seven, Inc. at a rate of $97.50 per share that equates to a lump sum of $4.9 billion in cash. 

The deal bolsters Gilead’s portfolio of oncology drugs through Forty Seven Inc.’s blood cancer medicine, which is expected to be on the market within 2 years. 

Chairman and CEO of Gilead Sciences Daniel O’Day remarked, “We will now work together to accelerate the progress of Magrolimab and advance Gilead’s work in immuno-oncology.” The deal is the first major outright acquisition under O’Day’s leadership since taking over the company a little over a year ago.  

O’Day was appointed under the mandate to address Gilead’s struggling stock price, which has declined since facing competition from generic HIV drugs. Overall sales are expected to decline 0.2% from $22.45 billion to $22.4 billion this year. O’Day has also stated that more acquisitions of a similar size are in the plans for Gilead. 

Apple to boost Siri with the acquisition of Voysis

Apple has acquired the Dublin-based artificial intelligence start-up Voysis. The financial details of the deal have not been made public. 

Voysis is focused on using machine learning to improve responses for systems that utilize voice commands. 

Integrating Voysis with Apple iPhone’s Siri will address underperforming results on the Lope Ventures’ annual Digital Assistant IQ test. Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa currently score better than Siri in the “commerce” category. Voysis software also uses WaveNets, developed by Google’s DeepMind, to create realistically human-sounding synthetic voices. 

The acquisition is the second deal Apple disclosed in the last two weeks. The tech giant also bought Dark Sky, a popular weather app for iPhones and iPads. 

Koch Industries completes its purchase of Infor

Koch Industries announced on Monday that it has completed an acquisition of Infor in a deal projected to be valued at $13 billion. 

Infor is an enterprise software company that focuses on business applications for organizations delivered through cloud computing as a service. Infor had previously been owned by the private equity company, Golden Gate Capital. 

Infor will operate as an independent subsidiary of Koch, benefiting from the chemical manufacturer’s vast resources. Infor will bring new capabilities to boost Koch’s digital transformation by building out a product family with a focus on industry-specific solutions. 

Moving to a cloud-based system will help Koch become less dependent on legacy systems which have proven ineffective for manufacturing companies as they’ve tried to cope through the coronavirus crisis. 

In Other News

We are also paying attention to the following developments this week:

• ViacomCBS has purchased 49% of MIRAMAX from BeIN Media Group for $375 million. Miramax comes with a library of over 700 titles, including “Pulp Fiction,” “Good Will Hunting,” and “Chicago.”

• A few months back, The Information reported that CNN was looking to launch a curated digital news service to compete with Apple and Facebook. It was announced this week that CNN has acquired content-recommendation startup Canopy in preparation for its new service launch.

• Location data & intelligence companies, Foursquare Labs Inc. and Factual Inc., announced that they will join forces and merge into one company with the goal of becoming a data and intelligence powerhouse. 

• Personal finance company SoFi announced that it is acquiring payments software company Galileo Financial Technologies, Inc. for $1.2 billion in a cash-and-stock deal.

• According to 9to5mac, Apple is reportedly in the process of acquiring NextVR, a live event virtual reality company that aims to change the way people watch sports and entertainment. 

• Last year, as part of the much discussed Walt Disney Company and 21st Century Fox $71 billion deal, Disney acquired the popular Indian streaming platform Hotstar. This past Friday, the rebranded Disney+ Hotstar officially debuted in the land of Bollywood.