Billionaire-Owned Lab Network Mulls Price Cut in Brazil Offering

(Bloomberg) -- Diagnosticos da America SA, a health-care firm owned by Brazil’s billionaire Bueno family, has signaled to investors it’s willing to take a price cut to push through a share sale.

Dasa, as the firm is known, has slashed the expected price range of the transaction to between 56.75 reais ($10.04) and 60.00 reais per share, from a previous range of 64.90 reais to 84.50 reais per share, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company hasn’t made a final decision on pricing and talks are ongoing, the people said, asking not to be named because the discussions are private.

Dasa declined to comment.

Dasa isn’t the only firm struggling to price a transaction in Brazil’s volatile market, with over half a dozen firms suspending their initial public offerings in March. Last month alone, offshore investors pulled about 4.6 billion reais out of local stocks amid a worsening pandemic and concerns about the pace of economic rebound.

Under the new range, Dasa’s share sale could raise as much as 4.6 billion reais, which the firm will use to finance a hospital acquisition spree it recently embarked on. The deal, scheduled to price Tuesday, is being led by Bradesco BBI, with BTG Pactual, Bank of America, Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, Banco Safra, Banco Santander Brasil and Itau BBA also part of the sales team.

The transaction will be key in defining the size of the fortune of one of Brazil’s wealthiest families, the Buenos. The clan’s late patriarch, Edson Bueno, and his ex-wife, Dulce Pugliese, bought the majority of the firm’s shares over the past decade, remaining business partners even after divorcing.

Though Dasa remained publicly traded, a low free float of near 2% of shares made the stock prone to volatility and price distortions. On Tuesday, shares were trading near 145 reais each, well above what was proposed in the share sale.

After Edson Bueno died in 2017, Dasa was split between Dulce, her and Edson’s daughter Camilla and her stepson, Pedro, who’s also the firm’s chief executive officer. Though Dasa is their main asset today, the family’s fortune comes from a multibillion-dollar transaction done nearly a decade ago. Edson Bueno and Dulce agreed in 2012 to sell Amil, a health insurer they created, to UnitedHealth Group Inc. for about $4.9 billion.

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