In Yet Another Multimillion-Dollar Deal, Stryker Corporation Buys Turkish Hospital Furniture Manufacturer

Stryker, a leading player in the global medical devices market, announced that it has acquired a Turkish company that specializes in the design and manufacture of medical beds and other varieties of patient furniture. Muka Metal A.S., was acquired by Stryker in an all-cash transaction – but the company has not disclosed further details of the deal. Sources close to the deal expect all shareholder and regulatory approvals to be finalized by 2015 Q3, following which the deal will be successfully closed. 

Muka’s CEO, Serkan Kantarci, said in an interview with Arab Health that his company has been in operation since 1966 but was primarily a manufacturer of office furniture until it forayed into the medical furniture manufacturing business nearly 50 years later, in 2004. Before a definitive foray into the medical furniture market, Muka invested about two years in building the perfect hospital bed prototype.

But growth came easily after Muka had taken its first tentative steps into the medical furniture industry. It soon set foot in lucrative, yet highly competitive markets such as the United States. Today, the company’s business is conducted across 52 countries and six continents.

With this unstoppable growth, Muka was in direct competition with Stryker at the global level. The two companies then decided that it was in their best interests to govern their business dealings in the Latin America region. This led to the signing of a distribution agreement between the two companies in 2012.

Timothy Scannell, president of the Stryker Group, said that Muka is a trusted and established brand that will smoothen his company’s expansion in the global medical device and hospital furniture market. Styrker’s current portfolio of patient-handling equipment has a few gaps that can be effectively bridged by the product range that Muka brings to the table.

This is Stryker’s third major deal in the last one year – in 2014, the company acquired Surgical Dynamics’ spinal implant business for US$135 million and in 2015, the company inked a US$172 million deal for the takeover of Pivot Medical, which is best known for its hip restoration system.