Merck KGaA agrees to acquire Silence Therapeutics for $20 per ADS
Merck KGaA agreed to acquire Silence Therapeutics in an all-cash transaction offering $20 per American depositary share (ADS). The agreement values Silence’s equity at approximately $1.3 billion and enterprise value at $1.1 billion, subject to customary closing conditions.
The contemporaneous alert and Silence Therapeutics announcement explicitly state that Merck KGaA agreed to acquire Silence in an all-cash transaction for $20 per American depositary share. This is new, forward-looking information that changes ownership, deal-completion probabilities, target-holder proceeds, and Merck’s capital allocation, so it qualifies as a material merger_acquisition development. The supplied transaction context gives an approximate $1.3 billion equity value and $1.1 billion enterprise value, subject to customary closing conditions; therefore the status remains announced rather than completed. The exact real-world announcement time is not stated independently of publication and alert timestamps, so 12:03:11Z is retained as an estimate with moderate timestamp confidence. Only SLN and MRK.DE are approved as directly affected listed stakeholders; broader competitor, RNAi-platform, and CDMO read-throughs are conditional and are excluded.
MERCK KGAA TO BUY SILENCE THERAPEUTICS FOR $20/ADS IN CASH
German drugmaker Merck KGaA XETR:MRK said it would acquire UK-based Silence Therapeutics NASDAQ:SLN in an all-cash deal for about $1.3 billion, bolstering its pipeline of precision medicines and adding RNA-targeting drug technology.