The boffins who left biotech firm Monsanto in 2001 are now ready to take it on
K.K. Narayanan was stunned. “Why do you need VC money? Instead pledge your cars or wives’ jewellery, like we did at Infosys,” he was told. And Narayanan thought that N.S. Raghavan, one of the co-founders, of Infosys, would understand a bunch of bright biotech scientists.
So Metahelix has the product and the distribution. Still, that may not be sufficient. When they do enter the market, gone will be the low-hanging fruit of converting non-Bt. farmers to Bt. ones. That battle is already over, for Monsanto won it. “The Indian cotton market is almost fully penetrated by Bt. cotton,” says Jagresh Rana, director at Mahyco Monsanto Biotech (MMB), the joint venture between Indian seed company Mahyco and Monsanto which licences the latter’s Bt. cotton in India. “The trend today is farmers shifting from the first to second generation Bt. technologies,” he says.
Fact File
The Company: Agricultural biotech company, Metahelix.
The Opportunity: A Rs. 2,000 crore Indian market for cotton seeds
The Target: Capture 10 percent market share over next 3-5 years. That’s Rs. 200 crore in revenue based on today’s market and prices.
Strengths: It has the product — its own version of a genetically modified cotton seed, which is cheaper and offers added protection against pests.
The Challenge: Breaking into a market that is controlled by the world’s largest player in genetically modified seeds, Monsanto.
Bt. Coton Blues
Rapid adoption of genetically modified (GM) seeds has left many environmentalists aghast, as they questioned the long-term effects of GM crops on human health and the environment.
(This story appears in the 14 August, 2009 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)