Rehovot, Israel
August 30, 2007
Evogene Ltd. (TASE: EVGN) today reported financial results
for the second quarter ended June 30, 2007.
"During the past five years - initially as a division of
Compugen, and then as a private company - Evogene created a
unique, powerful and continuously improving agbio discovery and
development capability,” stated Ofer Haviv, Evogene President
and CEO. “Now, in our first quarterly report as a public
company, we are pleased to focus on the accelerating
commercialization of this broadly applicable capability. During
the past few months, we announced collaborative activities with
Ormat Ltd., a leading company in the field of alternative
energy, for development of crops for biodiesel use; with Bayer
CropScience, a world-wide leader in agbio, which exclusively
licensed the rights to certain genes discovered by Evogene for
increasing the productivity and yield of a Bayer core crop under
drought and other stress conditions; and with Rahan Meristem
Ltd., a world-wide leading producer and marketer of banana
plantlets, for development of banana plants with resistance to a
key banana disease.” “We welcome our new shareholders and
enthusiastically look forward to reporting our continuing
progress and growth”, Mr. Haviv concluded.
Revenues for the quarter were $129,000* compared to $10,500 for
the second quarter of 2006. The net loss for the quarter was
$738,000 (including a non-cash charge of $225,000 for
amortization of deferred compensation), or $0.05 per share,
compared with a net loss of $836,000 (including $13,000 of
deferred compensation), or $0.06 per share, for the
corresponding quarter of 2006.
Revenues for the first six months ended June 30, 2007 were
$146,000, compared to $34,000 for the same period in 2006. Net
loss for the first six months of 2007 was $1.4 million
(including a non-cash charge of $282,000 for amortization of
deferred compensation), or $0.1 per share, compared with a net
loss $1.6 million (including $31,000 of deferred compensation),
or $0.15 per share, for the same period in 2006.
As of June 30, 2007, Evogene had $9.9 million in cash, cash
equivalents, cash deposits and short-term marketable securities,
an increase of $6.6 million from $3.3 million as of March 31,
2007, reflecting the net proceeds from the IPO on TASE completed
in June.
* Converted from New Israeli Shekels (NIS) at the exchange rate
on August 28th, 2007 (4.125NIS = $1.00) for the convenience of
readers.
Evogene’s mission is to be a world leader in delivering
improved plant traits to the agro-biotechnology and biofuel
industries through the use of a continuously improving
proprietary platform combining state-of-the-art computational
genomics, molecular biology and advanced breeding methods.
Evogene’s current trait development portfolio includes: abiotic
stress tolerance and yield, enhancement of cotton fiber quality,
improving nitrogen use efficiency, increasing oil yield for the
biodiesel use and plant manufacturing of therapeutic proteins.
Evogene was created in 2002 by the spin-off of the
agro-biotechnology division of Compugen Ltd. (Nasdaq: CGEN).
Evogene’s core in-silico technology, the ATHLETE, is based on
Compugen’s proprietary LEADS computational platform. Evogene
completed an IPO on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange in June 2007. |
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