Source: Daily Camera (Boulder, CO)

Agribusiness giant Monsanto Company's $300 million purchase of Boulder-based Emergent Genetics last month represented the culmination of six years of work by partners Mark Wong and Sam Dryden.

From the start, the business partners sought to make Emergent Genetics, an international cotton seed seller and research firm, a profitable acquisition target.

The seed industry veterans started company in 1999, entering a highly consolidated part of the agriculture industry armed with start-up money from private equity funds.

It bought the Stoneville Pedigreed cotton seed company in Memphis, a Danish company, a pair of cotton seed research companies in India and another in Chile. In a matter of years, Emergent Genetics was breeding cotton seed, producing and selling it around the world, capturing 12 percent of the domestic market and growing in the developed world.

"Our goal was to build a worldwide network of seed companies doing research in the areas that the "Big Six" companies were trying grow in," said Wong, 55.

The "Big Six" -- Monsanto Co., Dupont, The Dow Chemical Co., Syngenta, Bayer AG, BASF -- dominate the global sales of seeds to farmers and the marketing of new kinds of crops.

As a result, making a new global seed company big enough to go public is nearly impossible, and getting acquired is the most surefire way to profit from the startup investment, Wong said.

Emergent Genetics wasn't the pair's first experience with the process. Wong and Dryden, also 55, moved to Boulder in 1982 to build up corn company Agrigenetics Corp. and sell it, which they did in 1985.

Over its six-year run, Emergent Genetics pioneered 40 varieties of cotton seed and turned a healthy profit, Wong said.

The company's success in cotton seed research is what attracted buyers, Wong said, and the fact it was profitable drove the acquisition price to $300 million.

Their former company will be firmly part of Monsanto by summer's end, something that Wong expresses a twinge of sadness about.

"We were sort of a mid-sized company with its own culture, and now it'll be a part of a bigger company that has its culture," he said.

After taking the summer off, Wong and Dryden will see what new venture piques their interest.

Copyright ©2005 Daily Camera, Boulder, Colorado
Reprinted with permission