The transaction is expected to close this week
By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com
When the US$63 billion merger between Bayer and Monsanto closes on Thursday, only one of the company names will be visible going forward.
“Bayer will remain the company name (and) Monsanto will no longer be a company name,” a Bayer statement said yesterday. “The acquired products will retain their brand names and become part of the Bayer portfolio.”
The decision to remove Monsanto’s 117-year old name from the equation may be connected to consumer trust concerns.
Some groups have protested the company’s most popular product, Roundup, and other demonstrations targeted Monsanto’s GMO crop technology.
Moving forward without the Monsanto name is a way to promote the merged company’s values, said Liam Condon, president of Bayer’s Crop Science Division.
“The more important point now, once we change the company name, is that we talk about what the new company will stand for,” he told reporters yesterday, The Washington Post reports. “Just changing the name doesn’t do so much — we’ve got to explain to farmers and ultimately to consumers why this new company is important for farming, for agriculture and for food, and how that impacts consumers and the environment.”
Bayer will also look to work together with concerned groups to engage in open dialogue.
“Agriculture is too important to allow ideological differences to bring progress to a standstill,” Werner Baumann, chairman of Bayer AG, said in the statement yesterday. “We have to talk to each other. We need to listen to each other. It’s the only way to build bridges.”