LION bioscience Announces Sale of its Shareholdings in Tripos Inc.
No Strategic need for Tripos shareholding after Successful Completion of NetGenics acquisition
HEIDELBERG, Germany, - LION bioscience AG announced today that it has sold all of its shareholdings in Tripos Inc. Total net proceeds to LION from the entire transaction, came to US$22.5 million.
LION had purchased 409,091 shares of convertible preferred stock from Tripos in early February 2000 for a total purchase price of US$9 million. In late January 2002, LION converted these shares into 818,192 shares of Tripos common stock. At this time, Tripos paid LION an accrued dividend on these shares of convertible preferred stock of more than $890,000. On February 7, 2002, LION sold all of its shares of Tripos common stock. The net proceeds to LION from this sale were approximately US$21.6 million.
"Following our recent acquisition of NetGenics, LION now has all of the elements for delivering an industry-leading data and application integration platform for the Life Sciences industry. As a result, we no longer consider our investment in Tripos to be of strategic value to LION. Therefore we have decided to sell our shareholding in Tripos," said Dr. Friedrich von Bohlen, CEO of LION bioscience. "But of course, LION is committed to continuing its collaboration with Tripos in providing Bayer AG with a pharmacophore informatics platform to accelerate Bayer's drug discovery activities." LION is the project leader of this collaboration.
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