Monsanto shareholders approved on Tuesday the company’s $66 billion acquisition by Germany-based Bayer AG., which was first agreed upon in September. Based on preliminary tabulation, Monsanto said in a press release that 99 percent of all votes cast were voted in favor of the merger.
The deal requires regulatory approval to close as expected in late 2017. If the acquisition closes, it will create a company commanding more than a quarter of the combined world market for seeds and pesticides in the fast-consolidating farm supplies industry.
The acquisition came after a string of large mergers in the agribusiness sector in the last year or so, including ChemChina’s purchase of Swiss chemicals company Syngenta AG and a merger of Dow Chemical and DuPont.
Uncertainty about whether President-elect Donald Trump would stand in the way of large mergers after taking office in January has clouded the outlook of some deals. Trump vowed during his campaign to block AT&T Inc’s purchase of Time Warner Inc and look to break up Comcast Corp’s deal to buy NBC Universal, citing too much concentration. The U.S. Department of Justice or the Federal Trade Commission, which divide up the work of assessing mergers, makes the decision as the whether a merger is illegal under antitrust laws.
