This is a continuation of the previous post on Bayer / Monsanto.In the last post, we postulated that Bayer is a buying opportunity because it is the world's largest player in crops and seeds which is growing at mid single digit and its stable cash cow businesses in pharmaceutical and consumer drugs would provide huge free cash flow to investors. At its low, Bayer traded at EUR 68 billion market cap while generating FCF of EUR 7-8bn. Salivating right?
Bayer / Monsanto's Biggest Risk
As promised, today we discuss Bayer's risks. Bayer didn't crash and burn for no reason. It lost EUR 20bn in market cap when Monsanto's cancer causing weedkiller news broke but it had also lost another EUR 20bn before that as the market caught whiff of the bad news. To summarize here, Bayer has three key risks:
1. Monsanto could face litigations amounting to USD 5bn...