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What's immediately
striking is the comings and goings in the seed industry, with
wave after wave of large players who have entered the industry
through acquisitions in order to learn about the seed business
and then exited one after the other.
Today's big
players are agro-chemical companies, who were looking for
synergies with the seed business. It may well be that they, in
turn, will leave the field because they find these synergies
too elusive, just as the oil and pharmaceutical companies did
before them.
Every one of
these waves of acquisitions and subsequent divestitures causes
basic instability and considerable ripple effects throughout
the seed industry, It leads to a frequent reshuffling of the
cards, but that's not an unusual situation in today's global
economy which is replete with mergers, acquisitions and
consolidations.
The wave of
acquisitions that brought in the agro-chemical giants has
ebbed and we have entered the consolidation phase, but there
are still some acquisition targets out there. |
