Tag: Manufacturing

In 2020, Danaher Corporation agreed to divest assets to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that its proposed $21.4 billion acquisition of General Electric’s biopharmaceutical business, GE Biopharma, would violate federal antitrust law. Sartorius Stedim Biotech S.A. is the approved divestiture buyer. Sartorius agreed to obtain the Commission’s prior approval if it proposed to acquire Novasep Process SAS’s chromatography equipment business. On Feb. 1, 2022, the Commission announced that it granted Sartorius’s petition to proceed with this acquisition.

Following a public comment period, the Federal Trade Commission has approved a final order settling charges that three PET resin producers’ proposed $1.1 billion joint acquisition out of bankruptcy of an under-construction PET production facility would violate federal antitrust law.

The Federal Trade Commission is seeking to block Lehigh Cement Company LLC’s $151 million acquisition of rival Pennsylvania-based cement producer Keystone Cement Company, alleging the deal would harm regional competition in the market for the key ingredient used to make concrete.  The FTC alleges that the acquisition would harm competition in the market for gray portland cement in eastern Pennsylvania and western New Jersey, reducing the number of significant competitors from four to three. The administrative trial was scheduled to begin on Nov. 2, 2021, but on June 4, 2021, the FTC announced that the parties have abandoned the transaction.