Triangle Business Journal -- Riemser Arzneimittel, a German pharmaceutical company with annual sales of about $150 million, has moved into the Triangle after purchasing the Durham-based division of Curasan AG.
The unit, which has about a dozen employees, sells a line of dental products. Riemser has bought the worldwide rights to those products, which go by the trade names Cerasorb, EpiGuide and Revois. U.S. sales of the treatments were about $1.5 million during the first half of the year.
In a press release announcing the deal, Germany-based Curasan said it expects to take in a minimum of 15 million euros (roughly $22 million) from the deal with Riemser.
The transaction gives Riemser, which has 650 global employees, its first foothold in the U.S. Riemser makes products for indications including dermatology, infectious disease and cancer, but it doesn’t sell any of them in America.
“We are the first kind of mainstay in the U.S.,” says Rick Patton, Riemser’s vice president of sales. “They view this as kind of their launching point to become much more active in the U.S. side of things.”
Patton says the Durham workers are all in customer support, administrative or sales roles. The office has been in the Triangle since 2004, when Patton led a team that launched the Curasan business in the United States.
Riemser Arzneimittel is roughly 75 percent owned by the family of CEO Norbert Braun. The other 25 percent is jointly owned by TVM Capital, a venture capital company, and the financial services arm of GE Healthcare.
The Curasan deal closed July 1.