IMS Health at Goldman Sachs Annual Global Healthcare Conference - Part 2.

(From Fair Disclosure Wire)

NANCY COOPER: All right. Well, let me give you the question. I get this question with frequency. Let me just recap where we were. The strategic decision that made us decide to enter into the merger was you would end up with three number-one companies that were market intelligence companies, and they were number one in their space. When we looked at the underlying processes of what we all did - all three of us - we all did the same thing. We collected data, we cleaned data, we did this-- we're a huge data processor, and we produced this. We had a lot more consulting and services. We thought we could do that for them. They had a lot of data our pharma clients would be interested in; they could do that for us. So, our view was it was-- had great strategic merit. It has incredible process improvement you could do underneath, and we structured the transaction such that our shareholders got 60% of their compensation in the form of stock. At that time, the Vianew stock was trading at 23 euro, and by the time the deal got in trouble, the value of that was at 28 euro. So, we felt we made the right thing. We would have been the largest play. Luckily for us, we entered the deal in a very strong position, and we exited the deal in a very strong position. In fact, our operating performance has improved each quarter since the deal ended. So, it was very interesting. I still think it had really good strategic merits. But, we're going to continue in our way because we have plenty of opportunities. We'll continue to look for some of the data elements they had. But, none of that is a gate for our future. UNIDENTIFIED AUDIENCE MEMBER: Is it hypothetical that now that that organization will be owned by, effectively, a group of private investors that some of those assets that had previously been part of that enterprise may be available to you in some form or fashion?

NANCY COOPER: It might be, but what was strategically interesting to us was to get the two verticals - two verticals, of which one was very strong and one had more questions to it was the interesting part - not a subset of the assets. UNIDENTIFIED AUDIENCE MEMBER: Nancy and Darcy, thank you very much for your time. As always, very informative and very helpful in terms of thinking about the market and about your company. So, we appreciate you being here. Thank you, everyone. Enjoy the rest of your afternoon, and, hopefully, we'll see many of you around the pool later this evening. NANCY COOPER: Thanks. [Thomson Financial reserves the right to make changes to documents, ...