Bioceres Files for IPO

Bioceres has filed an F-1 form with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for its initial public offering (IPO). No terms were set in the filing, but the offering is valued up to $80.5 million. The company intends to list its American depositary shares (ADSs) on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol BIOX.

The underwriters for the offering are Piper Jaffray, Itau BBA and Raymond James.

This is a fully integrated agricultural technology company with a strong leadership position in South America and access to global agricultural markets through its direct distribution channel and industry-leading partners. The company believes that it has a distinct multifaceted approach to the commercialization of products, of which its proprietary distribution channel forms an important part.

The company’s ability to deliver multiple, value-creating technologies, including seed biotechnology and agro-industrial biotechnology, to customers globally mitigates risks that channel partnerships may create. Bioceres works with global agricultural firms and researchers to create, develop, deregulate and commercialize technologies suited for targeted high-growth markets in agricultural and industrial biotechnology.

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Bioceres anticipates that its first commercialized trait technology will be HB4, its yield-enhancement technology through abiotic stress-tolerance, which in April 2015 received biosafety regulatory approval in Argentina with respect to soybeans through a joint venture entity. Recently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) completed its Early Food Safety Evaluation process for the plant protein responsible for the HB4 stress tolerance trait, or HB4 Protein.

In the filing, the company said:

We currently generate revenues primarily through the sale of seeds and the provision of research and development services through our subsidiaries to our joint ventures and other product development partnerships. As the technologies under development by our joint ventures or other partners receive regulatory approvals and are commercialized, we anticipate that our primary source of revenues will be derived from the sale of seeds that contain our biotech traits or are treated with our seed treatments, including royalty payments and license fees, and to a lesser extent, the commercialization of enzymes and other agro-industrial biotechnology solutions.

The company intends to use the net proceeds from the offering for general corporate purposes, including to develop and commercially expand its agro-industrial biotech business, to develop next generation seed and agro-industrial biotech solutions through continued technology sourcing and product development efforts, to develop a proprietary channel for seed distribution to fund working capital needs and to make capital expenditures.

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