Ag tech firm Farmers Edge has inked a deal with majority shareholder Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited to sell all common shares at 35 cents apiece, the company announced late yesterday.
The move to go private comes nearly three years after Farmers Edge’s initial public offering (IPO) when shares started at $17.
A newly-formed Fairfax subsidiary intends to purchase in cash all common shares Fairfax and its affiliates don’t already own, Farmers Edge said in a news release. Fairfax currently owns more than 61 per cent of the company’s shares.
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Farmers Edge announced it was considering a proposal from Fairfax in November with an offer of $0.25 per share.
The transaction is expected to be closed in the first quarter of this year following approval by shareholders, the release said.
Farmers Edge, founded in 2005 in Pilot Mound, Man. by agronomists Wade Barnes and Curtis MacKinnon. Barnes left the company in March, 2022.
On the day the company went public in March 2021, Barnes told media the company would use the new funding — totaling a little over $125 million–to build on its vision of digital farming.
“We’ll be scaling up our teams to grow the business,” he said. “We’ll also be developing new products.”
However, the digital agronomy firm was beset by financial problems. In August, it announced layoffs of 20 per cent of its workforce and consolidation of operations in North America. It also shuttered its Australian operation.
–Geralyn Wichers is associate editor of AgCanada. She writes from southeast Manitoba.
