The largest shareholder in major Japanese pharma firm Taisho, the founding Uehara family, intends to smooth the way to the restructuring and expansion of the business by acquiring and delisting all of its stock. The nearly $5bn size of the deal would makes it the biggest management buyout in Japanese corporate history.

Several innovation-based Korean bioventures, including GI Innovation, S.Biomedics and Curocell, have managed to launch IPOs in 2023 despite prolonged depressed market sentiment and tougher stock exchange rules.

Forbion’s Sander Slootweg looks back over the company’s most successful year so far, and looks ahead at likely market and therapy area trends for 2024.

“A lot of companies are hurting because of the higher interest rates,” one major CEO observed recently, summing up a year which saw little headline-grabbing news on the M&A front for generic and biosimilar sponsors.