Fertilizer firm Agrium has extended its offer to buy U.S. ag retailer UAP for a fourth time while it works toward approval from U.S. antitrust regulators.
The US$39-per-share offer, which was most recently extended to March 14, will now be open until midnight (ET), April 30, during which time the company hopes to resolve what it says are U.S. regulators’ remaining concerns over “approximately a dozen” of UAP’s 370-odd outlets.
A waiting period under the U.S. government’s Antitrust Improvements (Hart-Scott-Rodino) Act has yet to expire or be shortened by U.S. regulators, Calgary-based Agrium said Friday.
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The company also said it will withdraw its notification and report form to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and re-file another revised version.
The company, by doing so, hopes to avoid a formal “second request” for more information from the FTC, which could set the process back to later this summer — although there’s no assurance the FTC wouldn’t make a second request anyway, it noted.
Agrium said it would re-file once it has resolved what it said are FTC staff’s concerns over about a dozen stores in UAP’s network. “Agrium plans to work with (the FTC) in an attempt to further reduce or eliminate the stores of concern,” the company said in a release Friday.
The friendly US$2.65 billion all-cash deal, as proposed, would make Colorado-based UAP an Agrium subsidiary. It would also make Agrium the biggest North American retailer of crop inputs and services, with broader geographic coverage as the two companies combine their “complementary footprints,” as they explained when the deal was announced in December.
Canada’s commissioner of competition in January announced he would not intervene in the Agrium/UAP deal, which leaves the two companies waiting on a green light from the FTC. The two companies have until Sept. 2 to complete a deal before they must go back to their boards of directors for approval of a new offer.
UAP runs about 370 distribution and storage facilities and three formulation plants, selling chemicals, fertilizer and seed to farmers, commercial growers and regional-level dealers across North America.
UAP’s Canadian wing, based at Dorchester, Ont., includes warehouses in B.C., Quebec and Ontario and product lines of herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, nutrients, adjuvants, inoculants, growth regulators and other specialty products.
