Evogene revenues up 9.5% in Q1 2013

The Israeli biotechnology company Evogene announced its financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2013.

Revenues for the first quarter of 2013 grew to $4.6 million, compared to $4.2 million for the same period in 2012. Evogene’s current revenues consist primarily of research and licensing revenues generated under the Company's various collaboration agreements with seed companies.

Cost of Revenues includes expenses related to the support of the Company’s on-going activities under collaboration agreements with seed companies, all of which provide for future milestone and royalty revenues. Cost of Revenues for the first quarter of 2013 was $2.2 million, compared to $2.1 million for the same period in 2012.

Research & Development expenses for the first quarter of 2013, which do not include expenses incurred in support of on-going collaborations which, as stated above, are accounted for as Cost of Revenues, were $2.2 million. This compared to $1.5 million for the same period in 2012. The increase in Research & Development expenses mainly relates to the development of new computational technologies, establishing new capabilities for our technology platform and expansion of internal research projects and related headcount.

Loss from ordinary operations for the first quarter of 2013 was $0.6 million, compared to a loss from ordinary operations of $0.1 million for the same period in 2012. This increase is mainly attributed to the increase in research & development expenses, as described above.

Total Comprehensive loss for the first quarter of 2013 was $0.5 million, compared to a total comprehensive profit of $0.5 million for the same period in 2012. The change from comprehensive profit to comprehensive loss is mainly due to the increase in loss from ordinary operations, as described above, and a decrease in financial income, net, mainly due to fluctuation in currency exchange rates and decline in interest rates.

As of March 31, 2013, Evogene had $52.5 million in cash, cash equivalents and short-term marketable securities, compared to $55.1 million as of December 31, 2012.

Ofer Haviv, Evogene's president and CEO, stated: "The necessity of raising crop productivity in order to meet the rapidly growing need for food, feed and renewable fuel is a key driver in agriculture worldwide. As such, the ability to enhance seed traits, and therefore crop productivity, through an understanding and utilization of plant genomics is expected to be a crucial factor in meeting these critical demands. This is our area of focus, and we believe we have now established Evogene as a recognized leader in this field.”

“Our long-term, highly focused research and development efforts have established a powerful integrated technology infrastructure based on proprietary scientific understandings of plant genomics. An important aspect of this technology infrastructure is our broad array of computational technologies, capable of integrating and analyzing the vast amounts of genomic data now becoming available through more and more advanced data creation methodologies. These vast new sources and types of biological data provide substantial opportunities for identifying methods for trait improvement. However, they also provide a major challenge, since gaining meaningful knowledge from them requires sophisticated analysis tools, such as the computational technologies that we have established, and believe are unique in the industry. In addition, our infrastructure incorporates strong capabilities for data generation and plant validation systems, allowing us to identify, prioritize and initially validate for trait performance over 1,000 genes per year,” added Mr. Haviv.

“During the first quarter of 2013, we continued to make progress under our multiple collaborations with leading seed companies worldwide. In addition, Evogene continued to expand its research and development capabilities, strengthening its genomic innovation with the launch of Gene2ProductTM, a proprietary computational platform designed to improve plant trait efficacy and probability of success of novel seed products, and the introduction of a new monocot plant validation system, the Brachypodium.”

“We are confident that our broadly applicable technology infrastructure provides us with the foundation for continued growth and development. We anticipate that this growth will come from both current and new collaboration partners, and from the leveraging of our core industry leading competences into new areas of advanced agriculture, such as ag-chemicals and second generation feedstock for biodiesel,” concluded Mr Haviv.