Bank of America Merrill Lynch Reiterates Buy Rating, $95 PT on Mednax

In a report published Wednesday, Bank of America Merrill Lynch reiterated its Buy rating and $95.00 price target on Mednax MD. BofA Merrill Lynch noted, “MD announced it acquired Anesthesiologists Associated in TN, and Pediatric Surgical and Associates, a pediatric surgery physician group in TX. The transactions closed on 12/31/12 getting the company meaningfully over its targeted spending for the year of $200m for anesthesia practices and $100m for pediatric deals. MD will host a call tomorrow, 1/3, at 10AM EST to discuss its 2012 M&A activity, which indeed was a very active year, and give an update on the 2013 deal outlook. MD paid cash and expects the deals to be immediately accretive to earnings. We estimate the anesthesia deal could add $0.10 to EPS over time, a medium sized deal for the company. Since our model does not include anesthesia deals but includes pediatric deals, we are raising our 2013/14 EPS to $5.86/$6.54 from $5.80/$6.44 to reflect the anesthesia acquisition, noting we expect numbers to keep going up as MD's acquisition strategy continues.” Mednax closed on Monday at $79.52.