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by stiGGG 2629 days ago
Next fun fact: Bayer and Monsanto together are now worth less than Monsanto alone at the time of the acquisition.
3 comments

Doesn't that mean, that Monsanto and Bayer were both hopelessly overvalued by the time of the acquisition? I wonder which other company-valuations are overblown only by the image a they have (cough ... facebook ... cough).

Metrics beyond "observables" -- assets, infrastructure, patents -- seem to be impossible, when considering investments, i.e. how much of these values are pure speculation (?). On the other hand -- these lawsuits were also "observable", but not really "measurable".

It seems two wrongs don't make a right.
What happened?
US juries, after years of reluctance, spontaneously decide that Glyphosat is a killer and worth heavy punitive damages.

As soon as a foreign company bought Monsanto, that is.

I don't really mind the verdict itself, but the timing is more than a bit suspicious.

> I don't really mind the verdict itself, but the timing is more than a bit suspicious.

Yeah, that's definitely a bit weird. It's similar to when a government entity in the USA suddenly discovered the Diesel cheating just when big foreign car manufacturers had large successes in the US market. Even though it was made to look like it in the news, Volkswagen wasn't the biggest perpetrator [0]. And currently the US government puts major pressure onto the DTAG-Sprint merger and constantly comes up with new requirements, e.g. now they want DTAG to stop buying Huawei products world wide [1].

[0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/Nitrogen...

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sprint-corp-m-a-t-mobile-...

It wasn't like foreign autos weren't successful in the us until 5-10 years ago. BMW, Audi, VAG were not just suddenly crushing us companies.
Too much evil spirit for a single company to contain. And they had to pay like 80M Eur in damages to a pensioner being related to Glyphosat being carcinogenic. This ruling may have set a precedent for the future.