On Friday second-generation biofuel developer Amyris filed an S-1 Initial Public Offering registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The document provides a first, ruff glimpse of the company’s overall strategy and what it believes are hurdles that could derail the execution of that strategy.
Amyris seeks to raise about $100 million and has hired a team of underwriters to go down their client list and sell the deal to the investor community. Lead underwriters are Morgan Stanley and Goldam Sachs. Also underwriting the IPO are J.P. Morgan, San Francisco-based Thomas Weisel Partners and Brazilian bank Banco Itau.
The company doesn’t have any clients and as accumulated a $120.4 million deficit over the past three years. The company is poised to loose more money in the next few years, having so far not signed any clients. “We do not currently have definitive agreements with customers and may not be able to enter into supply, Amyris says in the filing. The company warns: “We may not be effective in negotiating the terms of our relationships with these companies, which could adversely affect our future results of operations.”
Amyris plans to use IPO proceeds to scale production to go commercial with its biofuel, which is distilled from sugar-based hydrocarbon molecules, in 2011.
Now, for the more interesting information, who get paid what and who owns what.
Amyris CEO, BP veteran, John Melo, was paid $829,950 in 2009. The compensation includes a $408,333 base salary; a $200,000 bonus and $221,617 in “other compensations,” including $145,907 in housing and relocation expenses. Seperately, Were Melo, to leave the company he also stands out to make up to $4,371,034. Research and operations head, Joel Cherry got a $1,094,420 total compensation last year, largely boosted by $709,737 he made selling shares.
Compensation Table
Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers are Amyris’s largest shareholders, each owning 15.4 percent of the company. TPG Biotechnology Partners is a 12.1 percent owner. CEO John Melo holds a 4.3 percent stake and Kleiner Perkins’s partner John Doerr has a 14.4 percent equity stake.
Shareholders
On securing sugar, which is the feedstock of its second-generation biofuel Amyris writes: “If we are unable to decrease our production costs, we may not be able to produce our products at competitive prices and our business will not succeed.” Another hurdle — one shared by many cleantech companies — is its ability to even transition out of the lab and scale production. It writes: “We have no experience producing our products at the commercial scale needed for the development of our business, and we will not succeed if we cannot effectively scale our technology and processes.”
Amyris has 22 issued U.S. and foreign patents. Specific to Brazil and protecting its IP there. Amyris said it “may employ approaches to trade secret protection that are novel and untested under Brazilian law and we cannot guarantee that we would prevail if our trade secrets are contested in Brazil.” It does not provide details on what “novel” IP protection measures the company are.