Monument Circle Acquisition Corp (MON)

[Democritus_of_Abdera]

RE: DD CC Q&(no)A...

Dew, I also was struck by the defensive tone of the DD CC. Ebbs and flows in optimizing the hybrid carrier for a trait seems to me to be a normal event in the seed business. I did not see any reason to be defensive, albeit disappointment in lost opportunity was appropriate. It suggests an atmosphere of desperation, something that I would not expect to see in a company with the breadth of Pioneer-HiBred.

In my mind, the biggest near-term risk to growth in Pioneer’s corn franchise is an EPA approval of AcreMax that requires a refuge of >20%. Again, this would be a lost opportunity rather than a cause for hand ringing. But, it would remove a major near-term risk to Monsanto; i.e. if AcreMax has a small refuge requirement, they might quickly grab market share over SmartStax because, I believe, Pioneer would not be capacity constrained at the outset.

With this in mind, I was particularly interested in the DD CC Q&A’s regarding AcreMax... they were:

<Q – Mark Gulley>: Good morning, guys. What impact does this announcement have on AcreMax 1, or perhaps even more importantly, AcreMax 2?
<A – Paul Schickler>: Not at all related. There is no connection between the two. And what I would say on AcreMax is we remain very excited about that technology. We remain optimistic about the process that we have with the EPA, and we still have our plans for 2010 cultivation.

<Q – Donald Carson>: Yes. Just wanted to follow-up on John Bedbrook’s answer to my first question. John, are there other products in the pipeline that will be delayed by your past practice of incorporating a biotech event in non-elite germplasms, or is this strictly confined to Optimum GAT corn?
<A – John Bedbrook>: Don, we’ve talked about SPT, we’ve talked about Plenish high oleic, we’ve talked about Optimum AcreMax. All of those products are on – all those traits are on track as indicated.

<Q – Mark Gulley>: Yes. I just wanted to follow-up on my previous question on AcreMax 2. I could be wrong here, but I thought that Optimum GAT was part of the seven-gene stack that was going to be part of the enhanced offering with AcreMax 2. So perhaps I’m just a little bit confused on the impact on that product line from this announcement.
<A – Paul Schickler>: We don’t see an impact because, as I said, we continue to have access to glyphosate herbicide tolerance options for corn; no impact on Optimum AcreMax 2.