Monument Circle Acquisition Corp (MON)

[Democritus_of_Abdera]

Yield, a central theme of the Investor Day Conference...

A repeated theme in the investor day conference was that MON’s strategy is to maximize yield with the presumption that yield is more important than price when farmers choose a seed source. Hugh Grant (CEO) believes that ultimately MON will be able to double corn yields over that extant today.

Ted Crosbie’s presentation demonstrated that it is easy to spin the statistics on yield data. Ted is VP Breeding. In my opinion, the spin is effective because mean values for yield data are presented without measures of variance and there is limited or no statistical analysis.

The lack of statistical rigor and the implied lack of farmer interest in statistical analysis will negatively impact MON’s success in a yield focus strategy. The reason being that yields vary from farm to farm for reasons other than seed potential; local weather patterns, soil character, and farmer competence will add to the variance. Thus, it will always be easy for a competitor to cherry pick the data and find a favorable comparison. When statistical measures are not provided, it is hard to judge who is cherry picking and who is presenting a balanced view.... The default view will likely be that each company has chosen data to support their case and must be taken with a grain of salt...

Price comparisons, on the other hand, are easy to understand and likely will drive purchase decisions when yield data is confusing. Thus, I think that MON’s presumption that yield is more important than price when farmers choose seed is flawed.

I think that if Monsanto is to be effective with a yield-focused strategy, they need to add statistical measures to their presentations and they need to focus upon educating farmers on how to use these statistical measures to identify inappropriate spin of yield data by competitors. It is not hard to add a standard error of the mean bracket to the bar graphs and to explain that yields are significantly different only when the standard errors do not overlap.