Its official. Medit has been sold.
Medit has finally found its buyer. You may have heard the company was up for sale.
After initially agreeing a deal with a consortium led by US private equity firm The Carlyle Group and South Korean conglomerate GS Group, Medit has gone in a completely different direction and found a new buyer.
The consortium had a deal in place to buy a 100% stake in Medit Corp for around 3 trillion won ($2.2 billion USD).
However, the deal fell through when the consortium wasted valuable time by trying to renegotiate and cut down the value of the deal.
This allowed MBK Partners - the largest private equity fund in Northeast Asia - to intervene and secure a 100% stake in Medit Corp for just under the original price of 3 trillion won.
It is believed that the sale price was reduced slightly due to Medit’s latest earnings coming in at just half of what the company originally anticipated.
It’s believed that this new deal will allow for Medit to continue to grow and offer some of the best digital dentistry solutions on the market.
Both sides are hoping to sign a stock purchasing agreement before the end of the year, with the deal being finalised in early 2023.
What does Medit’s sale mean for the dental market?
Firstly, let’s acknowledge how big of a deal Medit’s sale actually is.
Before Medit, Carestream Dental was the latest intraoral scanning business, sold at around $600 million.
Not exactly a small amount, but still much, much less than Medit’s eye-watering $2.1 Billion deal.
Before that, Align Technology - the parent company behind the Invisalign system and the Itero range of intraoral scanners - acquired exocad for a reported $419 million.
The Medit deal has eclipsed anything we’ve seen in digital dentistry. It indicates the brand recognition and reputation that Medit has built relatively quickly.
It also shows outside investors' faith in the intraoral scanning space. Medit is a big player in the industry and has worked hard to develop efficient intraoral scanners, a strong suite of free applications, and great customer support.
There’s no reason that any other company that offers a similar product stack to Medit couldn’t be worth even more in the future.
Although there’s no way of knowing, we hope the company's leadership structure remains. Medit is an extremely innovative and fast-growing company that has done very well for itself, so it wouldn’t make sense to change it too much.
Especially when you consider that the company’s second-largest shareholder is founder Jang Min-ho - who isn’t actively involved in the company's management. So a major organizational structure change-up probably wouldn’t accomplish that much.
The deal is still yet to be finalized, but there’s no doubt that Medit’s sale will have huge ramifications on the market for years to come.
We have personally reviewed all the Medit intraoral scanners and found them to be some of the best in the market.
Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below about Medit being sold.