Kantar to Sell Healthcare Businesses to M3 Global

Kantar has announced its intention to sell its remaining specialist healthcare businesses, Kantar Profiles' Health unit and Kantar Media Healthcare Research (KMHR), to fieldwork company M3 Global Research.

Kantar's Profiles division was formerly known as Lightspeed. Its healthcare wing provides insights for research agencies, healthcare-focused consultancies and pharma clients, helping them to understand physicians, patients and payers.

KMHR is a sub-division of Kantar Media, and provides media measurement, audience insights and advertising intelligence for pharma and other healthcare advertisers, agencies and media companies. Its offering includes the MARS Consumer Health study as well as various syndicated studies of healthcare professionals - and explores attitudes, behaviour, media consumption habits and ad exposure within the sector.

M3 Global Research provides proprietary panels of verified healthcare professionals, covering 27 countries, as well as qual and quant methodologies. Two months ago it acquired qual specialist Med Planet, and a year earlier Germany-based pharma-insight.

Kantar CEO Chris Jansen says of the latest planned divestment, 'Today we set these two great businesses on a path for continued sustainable growth and leadership. Under this proposed new ownership structure, they will have the strategic framework and ecosystem to continue growing and innovating in their industry. At the same time, Kantar can more completely focus on its strategic priorities of empowering the world's biggest consumer companies to shape their brand future'. M3 Global Research CEO Anton Richter (pictured) says the combination 'further enhances his firm's capabilities in delivering high quality research data for the life sciences industry', adding: 'The KMHR addition expands our business operations and lays a foundation for our continued ambitious growth in healthcare market research, whilst bolstering our service offering for our growing global client base'.

The deal is expected to conclude early next month, and is subject to completion of legal and other processes. Financial details have not been disclosed.

The firms are online at www.m3global.com and www.kantar.com .