Perth, Western Australia
January 2, 2006
Source:
The Age
via
Checkbiotech
Crop chemical giant
Nufarm is quietly
positioning itself to be a player in the $32 billion global seed
business as opportunities grow to exploit links between the two
key farm inputs.
Managing Director Doug Rathbone
revealed Nufarm had taken over two more seed companies in the
past two months after acquiring Victorian canola breeder
Agseed Research 15 months ago.
The acquisitions have not been big enough to be reported to the
Australian Stock Exchange but Mr Rathbone said they were part of
a strategy to steadily develop a seed business again, first in
Australia, then globally.
"It's delivering the biology as well as the chemistry," he said.
"That's the way it's now going to go."
Last month Nufarm - based at Laverton - completed the buy-out of
its remaining two partners in Nugrain, a plant breeding
alliance it set up in 1998 with several farm services companies,
since reduced to GrainCorp and ABB Grain. Earlier this month
Nugrain took over another Victorian plant breeder, Access
Genetics, after buying the 50 per cent stake held by founder
Donald Coles.
Through aggressive acquisition of companies and brands, Mr
Rathbone has built Nufarm into one of the top 10 players in the
global crop protection market, with $1.6 billion in sales and a
$103.5 million net profit last financial year continuing four
years of double-digit growth.
Its business has been built on branding and developing
off-patent herbicides, rather than investment in basic research
into new proprietary chemicals.
Corporate affairs manager Robert Reis said the strategy would be
similar with seeds, where the company was unlikely to invest in
fundamental gene technology.
Nufarm sold its first big foray into plant breeding,
biotechnology company Florigene, two years ago. Nufarm said then
it did not see basic research into genetic modification of
plants as its way forward. Rather, it saw its role as marketing
biotech products.
Mr Reis noted that some of the patents on the technology
underpinning the new GM crops now growing around the world would
start to fall away in the next four to five years, 15 to 20
years after the patent applications were first made.
"We don't want people to think we are being distracted by
something that's not crop protection, but in Australia we have a
position that allows us to take a position over time," he said.
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