Implant maker bought

A health care company in Denmark is buying a French manufacturer of cochlear implants. The William Demant Holding Group will pay 57.5 million euros for Neurelec. Demant already makes traditional hearing aids and bone-anchored hearing devices. Neurelec is a 2006 spin-off from MXM based in the Sophia Antipolis technology park in the south of France. It was the first to launch a fully digital cochlear implant in 1992. Demant has a quarter of the global bone-anchored hearing aid market while Neurelec has about a fifth of the French cochlear implant market but only 2% of the worldwide market. More than two-thirds of the worldwide market belongs to Australia's Cochlear while Med-El and Sonvo split most of the rest between them.