Botox rival Revance to go private in $924 million deal

By Leroy Leo

(Reuters) -Anti-wrinkle injection maker Revance Therapeutics has agreed to be bought by privately held Crown Laboratories in a deal valued at $924 million, including debt, seeking scale to compete better with rivals in the aesthetic products market.

Revance manufactures Daxxify, which competes with AbbVie's Botox, while Tennessee-based Crown makes various skincare and aesthetics products like SkinPen for microneedling and anti-aging cream StriVectin.

Crown said on Monday it had offered $6.66 per Revance share held, a nearly 89% premium to the stock's last close. Shares of Revance surged 86% in morning trading.

The merger would help tap into a network of more than 10,000 medical professionals, retailers and an ecommerce channel, while also having an integrated manufacturing operation, the companies said.

Revance, which promotes its product to last twice as long as Botox, had initially priced it at a premium. In September last year, the company slashed Daxxify's price to bring it on par with Botox after struggling to attract customers due to the higher price.

"Unfortunately, the premium pricing strategy set up exceedingly high product performance expectations, which was a mistake," TD Cowen analyst Stacy Ku had said in a note last week, adding that the recovery will take time.

Since the price cut, sales improvement have been gradual. Daxxify's net revenue increased 27% to $28.7 million in the second quarter.

Sales of Botox for cosmetic and therapeutic use combined were rose nearly 8% to more than $1.5 billion during that period.

Revance had more than 7,500 customer accounts at the end of the second quarter, up from over 6,000 a year earlier.

The company's shares have lost about 90% of their value through Friday's close from the peak in May last year.

Revance's will no longer be traded on the Nasdaq after the completion of the deal, expected by the end of the year, the companies said.

(Reporting by Leroy Leo in Bengaluru; Editing by Devika Syamnath and Sriraj Kalluvila)