ICL acquires US-based precision agriculture company Growers Holdings, Inc.

ICL (NYSE: ICL) (TASE: ICL), a leading global specialty minerals and specialty chemicals company, announced on Wednesday that it has acquired Growers Holdings, Inc. ('Growers'), an innovator in the field of process and data-driven farming, as ICL further enhances its digital service offering and accelerates its global development roadmap.

 

Growers' agronomic services platform enhances decision-making capabilities for farmers, agronomists and other agro-professionals by creating easily adaptable and executable data-driven recommendations.

 

The Growers platform collects and structures manual and machine-generated farm data, instantly creating agile and return-focused plans for planting, fertilization and purchasing decisions that are streamed to farm machinery for effortless on-field application. Headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, Growers employs a team of data scientists, engineers, developers and agronomists, serving a rapidly growing customer base across the U.S.

 

"The acquisition of Growers expands and strengthens our offering of agro-digital services and our capability to develop innovative solutions to generate higher agricultural yields and more efficient and sustainable agricultural practices. By combining Growers' one-of-a-kind platform with ICL's extensive agronomic know-how, we are accelerating our market reach and development roadmap to create an unparalleled digital service offering focused on providing agro-professionals with unique access to currently untapped and unstructured data in a simple, fast and actionable way," said Raviv Zoller, ICL President & CEO.

 

"Agriculture is an industry that impacts every person on the planet. Our belief is that there is significant opportunity to drive a more sustainable, profitable future through the better utilization of agriculture data," said Steven Valencsin, Growers Founder and CEO. "We are very excited to be united in this mission with ICL and share a common approach to delivering value to our customers. For our customers, its business as usual, although we expect that ICL's unique know-how and access to the Israeli technological ecosystem and its broad capabilities will allow us to deliver increasing value over time."

 

Mr. Valencsin will remain CEO, and the company will continue to service their customers while leveraging ICL's vast resources to continue building technological solutions that deliver value to farmers and their trusted advisors around the world.

 

In addition, ICL announced on Wednesday that Yoram Sadan has been appointed as the Head of ICL's Digital Services Business, effective March 2020. Mr. Sadan is a global executive who brings significant experience in the technology and agriculture sectors, most recently with Netafim Ltd. and Siemens AG. Mr. Sadan will report to Raviv Zoller, ICL President & CEO, and will be a member of ICL's senior management team.

 

Mr. Valencsin and Mr. Sadan will discuss thematic trends in the agricultural market, including challenges in agriculture productivity, at ICL's upcoming investor event and will introduce the Growers platform and describe how it fits within ICL's ongoing initiatives.