Carcinogenic' litigation caused Bayer's miserable loss of more than 78 billion

The German pharmaceutical and agrochemical giant Bayer's financial report released on the 4th showed that Bayer had a net loss of 9.55 billion euros (approximately RMB 78.5 billion) in the second quarter of this year, the largest single-quarter loss in 10 years, mainly due to special project expenditures as high as 125 Billion euros (about 102.7 billion yuan), most of which are related to a series of litigation compensation.

In June of this year, Bayer reached a series of settlement agreements with the US plaintiff in tens of thousands of civil lawsuits surrounding the possible carcinogenicity of the herbicide “Roundup” produced by its subsidiary Monsanto, which will pay US$10.1 billion to US$10.9 billion (approximately RMB) for the settlement. 70.2 billion yuan to 75.8 billion yuan).

In June 2018, Bayer announced the completion of the acquisition of Monsanto, a US biotechnology company, for $63 billion (approximately RMB 438 billion).
 
In August 2018, in a lawsuit, Monsanto's herbicide was found to have caused cancer in a gardener in a school in the United States. Bayer was ordered to compensate US$289 million (approximately RMB 2 billion).

In May 2019, a jury in California, USA, ruled that the herbicide design of Bayer's Monsanto Company was defective and did not issue a warning that it contained "glyphosate", a cancerous ingredient. The jury believed that the company was responsible for the lymphoma of a local couple. The jury sentenced Bayer to pay more than US$2 billion (approximately RMB 14 billion) in damages.

In addition, due to the impact of the new crown pneumonia epidemic on the economy, Bayer expects sales to fall to between 43 billion and 44 billion U.S. dollars (approximately RMB 298.9 billion to 305.9 billion), which is far lower than previous expectations.

It is worth mentioning that on August 3, U.S. time, the American company Relan Animal Health Co., Ltd. announced the completion of the acquisition of Bayer's animal health business. The total amount of the merger and acquisition was US$6.89 billion (approximately RMB 47.9 billion). After the transaction is completed, the German Bayer Group will receive 5.17 billion US dollars in cash (about 35.9 billion yuan).