Altria/NJOY Deal Rationale
Altria recently agreed to acquire NJOY for up to $3.25B, with PWP and Moelis doing the heavy lifting on advising Altria and NJOY, respectively. It seems like a way overpriced move for Altria to be paying such an amount for a company with only 3% of the US vape market share, even if NJOY's trump card is that they have FDA approval for their products which the No. 1 and 2 market leaders in the US are struggling with. Considering that Altria has an IP-sharing agreement with Juul, why don't they just develop an in-house product rather than spend such a premium acquiring NJOY, especially after the whole Juul fiasco? Would love to hear some more discussion about this.
In the C&R space but not an alcohol & tobacco banker so could be wrong, but it seems like the major roadblock in the vaping space is FDA approval - the feds have been super slow with approving vaping products, and NJOY has the only pod-based vape that's FDA authorized, so Altria likely saw the acquisition as more of an IP acquisition that allows them to skip the roadblocks they'd face with developing their own technology. The 3% market share isn't probably too concerning for Altria, given their brand image and marketing power as one of the tobacco giants.
Also anyone know which specific bankers were working on the deal?
James Wappler was definitely the lead man on PWP's side, he's been Altria's go-to advisor for some time now. Moelis's team was a mixture between the C&R teams and the RX teams (Moelis RX worked with Njoy a while back when they were restructuring).