Amid ongoing discussions with regulators over its $43 billion takeover by ChemChina, Syngenta has not taken its eye off the ball.

Following the reporting by the company of its results where it’s sales and profit that missed expectations, the chief executive of the Swiss agrichemicals giant said this to CNBC.

“Right now we’re focused on only two things – our performance in the marketplace, our focus on customers…and growing our company. The second (thing) is to get the ChemChina deal done,” Erik Fyrwald told CNBC Europe’s “Squawk Box.”

Despite the fact that the deal has been delayed due to concerns among competition regulators, Syngenta still expects the ChemChina takeover bid to be completed by the end of 2016. Fyrwald hoped that the deal would be closed by the end of the year and informed that a small team was continuously working on the deal.

“We have had very constructive dialogues with the regulators around the world and those reinforce our confidence that we will get the deal closed by the end of the year and head into 2017 with full focus to drive our performance,” he said.

In the short term, the industry continued to see tough market conditions, the company warned after the company reported sales that fell short of analyst forecasts.

For the first six months of the current year, the company managed to garner sale of $7.09 billion. A Reuters consensus poll forecast a figure of 7.224 billion.

The group said that while reported sales are likely to show a mid- to single-digit decline, it expects that group sales for the year would be slightly below that of last year at constant exchange rates.

Noting a value below the $1.28 billion forecast by analysts, the net profit of the group for the first half was down 13 percent at $1.06 billion.

Fyrwald said that he expected an improvement in the business and trading environment while accepting that the company had seen tough trading conditions in the first half of the year which was probably the reason for the less than expected results for the aforesaid time period.

“The biggest issues in the first half were the low crop prices which continue but also we had severe weather conditions in Asia-Pacific, severe drought in Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines and horrendous rains in Europe that continued for much of the first half,” he said.

“(Weather) conditions have improved now and we expect strong growth in both Asia and Europe in the second half and significantly improved earnings in the second half too. I can tell you that me and my team are very focused on making sure that that happens,” he added.

(Adapted from CNBC)

Categories: Economy & Finance, Uncategorized