The headline premium is measured from a price that stopped existing on 30 April. That was the day Integer told the market it was reviewing alternatives, and from that moment its shares carried deal expectation. Quoting 51.8% against the 29 April close bundles the offer premium together with the auction’s own effect on the stock, then credits the whole thing to KKR. The 28.8% against the recent thirty-day VWAP is the figure describing what a holder gained from this agreement rather than from the announcement that preceded it. Both numbers are accurate. Only one of them is a premium.

• Compare the anchor date with Curium’s, struck the same morning. Curium priced Lantheus off 21 May, the last close before a sale leaked, and published three separate premiums to unaffected prices. Integer priced off the day before it announced a review, which is a different convention producing a number roughly twenty-three points higher. Neither is wrong and both are choices. On every take-private this quarter, read the anchor date before you read the percentage.
• Competitive frame: KKR bought the supplier, not the brand. A CDMO’s revenue attaches to other companies’ product cycles, and regulatory qualification plus validated tooling operate as switching costs, which is how Integer sits inside cardiac rhythm management, neuromodulation and vascular without owning a single label. That is a classic private-capital asset: sticky, capital intensive, predictable, and structurally discounted by public markets that would rather own the device company than the device company’s supplier. Add leverage and the same quality inverts into customer concentration risk, because a qualified sole source is an excellent business right until a customer’s volume moves.
• What to watch: the investment runs through KKR’s core private equity strategy rather than a traditional buyout fund, which signals a long hold instead of a five-year flip and should change how you model the exit and the capex. Note the day as well. CapVest’s Curium agreed to take Lantheus private at up to $8 billion the same morning, putting roughly $13.7 billion of listed healthcare into private hands in a single session. Read that as a statement about where public multiples sit, not as two coincidences. Whether $127 was competitive or simply the only bid will be settled by the count of parties contacted in the proxy’s background section.