A Guide to the Restructuring Wave Reshaping Crop Protection

There are more moving parts in the crop protection and seed industry right now than at any point since the 2015–2018 merger wave.

FMC announced this week that it is exploring a full sale, or sale of it’s assets.

Corteva is splitting into separate crop protection and seed entities.

BASF is preparing a spin-off IPO for it’s crop inputs business.

Syngenta is taking another run at going public in Hong Kong.

Bayer is managing it’s litigation challenges and restructuring Crop Science.

UPL is managing debt and looking to spin off its seed segment (Advanta).

Nufarm ran into challenges with their seed segment after a drop in fish-oil prices that challenged revenues, margins and outlook.

Each of these dynamics is relatively new, it is occurring for various, sometimes related reasons, such as structural market dynamics in crop protection, debt, public market incentives or litigation/regulatory. While each effort carries different risks challenges to manage, they all affect each other.

For example, a buyer for FMC is likely looking at what Corteva's crop protection business could traded at post-split to calibrate value, or on the flip side, Corteva could consider buying FMC.

Because there's so much happening in parallel, I wanted to put together a brief overview of where each company is currently, including what they're doing, why they're doing it, and what the key dynamics are within each business.

Note: This goes well in combination with a previous article titled: The Great Unbundling of Agribusiness

For a brief overview, here is a document I put together for reference exclusively for Upstream Ag Professional members as well (more details in the written portion).

FMC

This week, FMC's board authorized the exploration of strategic options, "including but not limited to the sale of the company."