A flurry of mergers in the health care sector appears poised to continue, as Bausch & Lomb is said to be ready to sell itself to Valeant Pharmaceuticals of Canada for about $9 billion.  A deal could be announced as soon as Tuesday, people briefed on the matter said, though they said that talks were continuing and could still collapse.  Bausch & Lomb, which makes contact lens solutions and other eye-care products, has been exploring a sale or a public stock offering for a number of months.  If completed, a sale may signal that the mergers industry is set to revive after months of fits and starts.  Though many advisers expected a steady growth in transactions this year, total deal volume was still down 8 percent from the same time last year, at $796.7 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.  Bankers and lawyers still believe that deal-making will rebound by the end of the year. Companies remain flush with cash and have access to cheap financing. And rising stock indexes have given boards and management teams more confidence in pursuing big transactions.  Despite the overall slump in mergers, health care has proved one of the most reliable sources of new takeovers. Deals worth about $72.4 billion have been announced in the sector so far this year, Thomson Reuters estimates. Just under a third of that was disclosed in the last two months, thanks to deals like Thermo Fisher Scientific’s $13.6 billion takeover of Life Technologies.  Much of the deal activity has been prompted by the private equity industry, which has been seeking to strike new acquisitions or cash out existing investments and pay their limited partners.  Deal-making by private equity firms is up 44 percent from the year-ago period, at $133 billion, according to Thomson Reuters data.  Bausch & Lomb’s current owner, the private equity firm Warburg Pincus, has looked to clear the decks for its latest fund, which closed earlier this month at $11.2 billion. It and TPG Capital are already weighing a sale or initial public offering of another investment, the luxury retailer Neiman Marcus.  At $9 billion or so, the sale of Bausch & Lomb would be a tidy payday.  Warburg Pincus paid about $4.5 billion for the company in 2007, and reaped a healthy portion of that from a special dividend in March. Bausch & Lomb’s board authorized $772 million to be paid to shareholders, primarily Warburg Pincus, and financed the payout by borrowing about $800 million.  At the time of its sale to Warburg Pincus, Bausch & Lomb was trying to move past one of the more difficult periods in its 160-year history. A year earlier, the company issued a recall of a popular contact lens solution because of manufacturing problems.  Since then, the company has rebounded, reporting $3 billion in sales last year. Still based in Rochester, N.Y., it has about 11,200 full-time employees.  Warburg Pincus hired Goldman Sachs late last year to begin pursuing a sale or initial public offering of Bausch & Lomb, with a preliminary price target of about $10 billion, people briefed on the process have said. After running into difficulty meeting that level, the investment firm moved toward an initial offering instead, filing papers in March.  But a sale became a possibility again after Valeant’s attempt to buy another drug maker, Actavis, collapsed a month ago. That deal, in which Valeant would have paid over $13 billion in stock, faltered in disagreements on price and other issues.  (Actavis subsequently agreed to buy Warner Chilcott, an Irish specialty drug company, for about $5 billion, after rebuffing approaches from the likes of Mylan.)  Shares in Valeant began rising on Friday after The Wall Street Journal reported news of the sales talks, and closed up 13 percent, at $84.47.  A takeover of Bausch & Lomb would be the biggest by Valeant, which has aggressively pursued deal-making as a growth strategy.  The company has struck roughly two dozen acquisitions in three years as a way to expand internationally and add to its offerings of specialty products.  Among its most recent transactions are the $2.6 billion purchase of Medicis Pharmaceutical and the $439 million takeover of Obagi Medical Products.  That string of mergers has supported steady sales growth. Valeant reported $3.5 billion in revenue last year, up 40 percent from 2011. The company, which is based in Laval, Quebec, has the resources to continue striking deals, with $413.7 million in cash as of March 31.  Bausch & Lomb would add a major new line of offerings for Valeant, which focuses on neurology, dermatology and generic drugs.  The Canadian drug maker had tried to add eye-care products before, bidding $353 million for ISTA Pharmaceuticals in December 2011 before withdrawing its offer the next month. ISTA sold itself three months later for $500 million — to Bausch & Lomb.
If completed, a transaction would be one of the biggest health care deals of the year. And it could reap a sizable profit for Bausch &#038; Lomb&#8217;s current owner, Warburg Pincus.