Plant genetics firm DuPont Pioneer of Johnston, Iowa, and agbiotech company Monsanto of St. Louis, have agreed to a series of licensing deals that will see DuPont pay over $1.75 billion for rights to Monsanto's soybean technologies in the US and Canada. Under the ten-year agreement, DuPont gains access to Monsanto's next-generation Genuity Roundup Ready 2 Yield (glyphosate tolerant) and Roundup Ready 2 Xtend (glyphosate and dicamba tolerant) soybeans. The deal gives DuPont greater flexibility to develop new products by combining or stacking Monsanto's genetics and traits with its own. It also ends a drawn-out litigation over Roundup Ready soybean seed patent rights. Monsanto has agreed to drop a $1-billion damages payment DuPont was ordered to pay last August. Although nearly doubling DuPont's outlay, the new deal makes commercial sense. “DuPont is both settling the dispute and thereby getting to use the technology as it had wanted [and] is also getting other innovative technology that Monsanto has developed,” says Greg Graff, associate professor in the department of agricultural & resource economics at Colorado State University, Fort Collins. Starting in 2014, DuPont will make four annual fixed royalty payments totaling $802 million, and will pay Monsanto at least a further $950 million in royalties between 2018 and 2023. Monsanto will also receive access to certain DuPont disease resistance and corn defoliation patents. “The fact that DuPont must still lean on Monsanto for product innovation despite its accelerated R&D efforts highlights Monsanto's first-mover advantage and supremacy in the industry,” says Jeffrey Stafford, equity analyst at Morningstar, in Chicago.
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06 December 2013
In the version of this article initially published, the amount of money in the title was given as “$1.75” instead of “1.75B.” The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.
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Dorey, E. DuPont pays $1.75B for Monsanto next-gen traits. Nat Biotechnol 31, 477 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt0613-477
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt0613-477
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Nature Biotechnology (2014)