Research archive for MON

And then possibly the biggest news of the day yesterday, Monsanto is supposed to be in the sights of Bayer, the German healthcare and agriculture business. Monsanto stock rallied hard in the pre market session, and then opened stronger, only to fall away a little in the normal session. The initial readings from my side suggested it may have been another German company, BASF. Bloomberg had a story early: Bayer Said to Explore Bid for $40 Billion Seed Company Monsanto. The old (150 year plus) German company is unlikely to raise equity.

Monsanto dropped their bid for Syngenta a couple of days ago. On Wednesday, they suspended trade for a little while and then announced that they would be dropping their 46 billion Dollar bid for the Swiss company. These are very important companies both for humanity and farmers, at the core we are all hard coded with producing (or catching) food, right? It would have been a merger of equals at some scale, they have identical market caps at the time of the announcement. Syngenta is now lower, obviously as the floor, the bid price, has been removed.

Monsanto is a controversial company. I often see posts on Facebook with deformed mice who have been fed food grown from genetically modified seeds. I won't pretend to know the science behind it all but I certainly know where I stand on the issue. I see myself as a conservation conscious individual. In the world I follow, I know that the biggest threat to endangered wild animals is land encroachment. GMO's are more efficient and require less land for higher crop yields. That allows more land to be untouched and to remain in their natural state. If everything was grown organically and naturally, the Amazon Jungle, the forests of Asia and certainly the plains of Africa would be under a lot more pressure. Today we feed 7.3 billion people using the same amount of land as we did 40 years ago to feed 4 billion people.

On Wednesday Monsanto, the agriculture company, released their Second Quarter Financial Results , which were not great. The market was expecting worse than they delivered, the share price jumped 4% on the results.

Today I am writing about a very interesting business called Monsanto who released results on Wednesday. Some of you may have heard of this business because it operates in a very controversial industry, generic seed manufacture. There is an ongoing debate about whether this is a good thing or not. Generically modified food scares people. Here is how the company describe their business from the latest annual report.