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But, as I said earlier, the seed industry is always changing.
Come the late 80's, many of the multinational seed acquirers had grown
disenchanted with seed. Those of us who had been in the trade for years knew
this is not a high profit margin business. Further, the majors discovered that
their highly paid MBA management, who were successful in running chemical and
pharmaceutical businesses, were facing new problems in the seed trade and in
many cases made poor decisions.
Thus, the next period of change. A
number of the multinationals left the seed trade, selling their trophy companies
to other multinationals who still saw a pot of gold at the end of the seed
rainbow. Other family seed business that had resisted the early call to sell,
now decided to cash in and take their chips off the table. The merger &
acquisition activity in seeds reached a new, higher plateau in the eighties. The
company names, headquarters location, management personnel and crop portfolios
were in constant flux. Europeans acquired in America and Americans acquired in
Europe. You needed a scorecard to keep track of the transactions. By this time,
L. William Teweles & Co. had become thirteen people with an office in Tokyo and
London. We counted more than 100 transactions, which we had initiated and
managed; ultimately, the number was closer to 140. |
