BIOX announces IPO plans
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007Investors will soon get a chance to throw their money behind another biofuel play in Canada. BIOX Corp., the Oakville, Ont.-based company that designs, builds and operates biodiesel production facilities based on its own proprietary process, announced today that it has filed with regulators for an initial public offering. RBC Capital Markets is leading an underwriting syndicate that includes BMO Capital Markets, Scotia Capital Inc., GMP Securities LP, Cormark Securities Inc., Genuity Capital Markets and Dundee Securities Corp.
The company currently owns and operates a continuous flow biodiesel production facility in Hamilton, Ontario, with a nameplate capacity of 67 million litres per year, achieved through two production lines operating in parallel.
“Using our existing modular design, it is our intention to build, own and operate additional biodiesel production facilities in jurisdictions where markets support the production and use of biodiesel. At this time, our target jurisdictions include Canada, the United States and the EU. We are currently in negotiations to establish four additional 67 million litre per year nameplate capacity plants that would provide us with up to an additional 268 million litres of capacity per year,” according to the company’s prospectus.
The company has not yet priced the offering, but you can get more details from the prospectus filed on SEDAR.
BIOX will join SunOpta and Lignol, and eventually Greenfield Ethanol, as publicly traded biofuel plays in Canada.
UPDATE: I’ve got an article in the Star on this. It points out that BIOX plans to build four more 67-million-litre a year plants with the IPO funds, and that it’s aiming to raise $150 million, which would give the company a valuation of over $300 million.

Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.