Monsanto exec to detail profit strategy
A top executive at Monsanto Co. plans to lay out a case for belief in the company’s ability to double its gross profits by 2012.
The Creve Coeur-based biotech giant sees a significant growth opportunity creating more yield for farmers through its investments in plant biotechnology and breeding, Steve Padgette, Monsanto’s vice president of biotechnology, plans to tell investors in London Friday.
Padgette will state that Monsanto is poised to seize on global opportunities stemming from existing technologies as well as products in the research & development pipeline, according to a preliminary release. Padgette will deliver his remarks as part of the UBS Best of Americas Conference. “After more than 10 years of farmers planting biotech traits, the prospects for growth are substantial,” Padgette said in a statement. “The opportunity for existing biotech traits outside the United States is nearly 275 million acres and a little more than a third of those acres carry Monsanto’s trait technology currently.”Monsanto said the opportunity for international growth is “most imminent and substantial” in Brazil and Argentina, where it is launching new trait packages. The company has received approval to offer new corn traits in those countries.
Monsanto is also bulking up its soybean business. Its high-yielding soybeans delivered a 6 to 10 percent yield advantage in the company’s recent Latin American trials, and Padgette is expected to tout that achievement.
Next week, Padgette will bounce to Ghent, Belgium to chat up Monsanto’s collaboration with BASF. That collaboration works to identify and commercialize novel “yield and stress” trait technologies for farmers.
Jeremiah McWilliams is a native Virginian who came to the Post-Dispatch in early 2007 to cover beer and other consumer products. He previously covered manufacturing for the Virginian-Pilot newspaper in Norfolk, Va. He is a graduate of Washington and Lee University. 
