ZURICH (Reuters) – Novartis is seeing robust curiosity from non-public fairness traders in addition to from different prescription drugs corporations for the Sandoz generic medicine enterprise it’s contemplating promoting, Chief Government Vas Narasimhan mentioned in a newspaper interview.

“We’ve seen appreciable curiosity from non-public fairness corporations in addition to different corporations out there,” Narasimhan advised Swiss newspaper Finanz und Wirtschaft.

“We’ve to do our work internally first to have the ability to present monetary information to a few of the events. That takes time. Inside a 12 months, we wish to have readability,” the CEO added.

The Swiss prescription drugs firm raised the prospect of divesting Sandoz in October.

All choices stay open, together with protecting Sandoz as a part of Novartis, spinning it off to shareholders, or promoting it to a different firm, the chief mentioned within the interview printed on Saturday.

“It will be untimely to favour one choice,” Narasimhan mentioned.

He declined to present a doable price ticket for Sandoz, which achieved gross sales of $9.7 billion final 12 months, about 20% of the group complete.

“If we at present learn that there are provides for 10 or 20 billion, we must always not take this too significantly,” he mentioned.

“Such provides are primarily put ahead by analysts after which by the media, not by us or by actual events. We’ve to attend for the precise negotiations.”

Novartis was wanting to make use of a few of the $21 billion proceeds from promoting its 33% stake in Roche for acquisitions, Narasimhan mentioned, though endurance was required due to excessive market valuations.

The corporate was curious about acquisitions in areas similar to cardiovascular ailments, immunology, neurology, hematology or oncology, he mentioned.

However Narasimhan declined to touch upon rumours linking Novartis with U.S. biotech firm Alnylam or Swiss drugmaker Vifor Pharma.