Argentinian company Bioceres Crop Solutions Corp. has agreed to buy Davis-founded Marrone Bio Innovations Inc. in an all-stock transaction valued at $236 million.
Bioceres (Nasdaq: BIOX) is based in Rosario, Argentina, and Marrone (Nasdaq: MBII) is based in Raleigh, North Carolina, with its research and development in Davis, where the company was founded. Marrone Bio moved its headquarters to North Carolina this year.
Marrone was the Sacramento area's sixth-largest locally based public company, with revenue of $38.4 million in 2020.
Bioceres works in agricultural bionutrition and seed care products. Marrone develops and sells biological controls to replace chemicals in farming.
"By combining our current commercialized products and pipelines, we will be in a position to serve all major agriculture input categories with low environmental impact, highly efficacious, biological based solutions," said Bioceres CEO Federico Trucco, in a news release.
The merger is anticipated to generate $8 million in annual cost reduction, the majority of which relates to the elimination of duplicative public company expenses and consulting fees, said Marrone Bio CEO Kevin Helash, in a release.
The larger scale of the combined company can accelerate and expand commercialization of Marrone’s existing products, said Dwight Anderson, managing partner at New York-based venture capital firm Ospraie Ag Science, in a release. Ospraie is Marrone Bio's largest shareholder.
“The combined companies will have the quality, experience and depth of management as well as the financial resources to realize the full potential of Marrone’s pipeline," Anderson said.
Pending approvals, the transaction should close in the third quarter this year. At the close, Marrone shareholders will own about 16 million shares of Bioceres. Marrone will designate at least two people to Bioceres’ board of directors.
Founder Pam Marrone started Marrone Bio in Davis in 2006 and took it public in 2013. But in 2015, Marrone was hit with an accounting scandal after former chief operating officer Hector Absi falsified sales numbers to make a bonus. The incident cost the company half its employees and more than $13 million for investigations, fines and other expenses. Absi later pleased guilty to a federal charge of conspiracy to commit mail, wire and securities fraud.
Bioceres has had development partnerships with Arcadia Biosciences Inc. (Nasdaq: RKDA), another Davis-based agricultural technology company.
