U.S. pharmaceutical company AbbVie Inc. is acquiring Pharmacyclics Inc. for $21 billion in a primarily debt- and equity-financed transaction. Leverage will be considerably higher than we expected, above 2x through 2016, compared with our initial expectations that leverage would be less than 1.5x; however, we forecast a gradual delevering over the next two years. We are affirming our 'A' corporate credit rating and revising the outlook to negative. The negative outlook reflects a risk to our base case, which indicates that our deleveraging scenario could be jeopardized by more debt-financed acquisitions as the company manages through the upcoming patent expiration on Humira. BOSTON (Standard&Poor's) March 5, 2015--Standard&Poor's Ratings Services today affirmed all of its ratings on
