It looks like mergers and acquisitions specialist ICBS Limited (Pink Sheets: ICBM) is planning to move off the pink sheets sometime soon. In a recent interview, ICBS CEO Garth McIntosh told MN1’s Andrew Coffey that the company is taking the steps it needs to move up the financial food chain.”Our intent is to move to the OTCBB within the next couple of months, as soon as we’ve sent in our audits,” McIntosh said during the interview. “We’re in the middle of the 2005-2006 audits.”
If the company does make the move to the Bulletin Board, it would be a big step forward for the company. As a company earning its pay by advising companies about mergers and acquisitions as well as by investing in potentially profitable companies, ICBS needs to grow itself so it can tackle bigger companies.
Not that the company has any lack of business right now. In addition to all its investments, the company has also made a healthy living advising more engineer-minded companies that may lack the business expertise needed to get their otherwise ingenious products on the market.
“These are guys who are usually experts at making widgets but they may not be the best businessmen in the world; they may lack certain skills that are required to take their company to the next level,” McIntosh said. “That’s where we step in and that’s what we do. We take an equity position and move the company up.”
But its investments are arguably the more interesting aspect of the company. According to McIntosh, ICBS has an impressive stable of companies it’s invested in.
“We’ve got interests in a brewery that makes a gluten-free beer, we’ve got a company that is in medical, we have one in communications, one in juice,” McIntosh said.
The gluten-free beer was one of the few companies McIntosh could talk about during the interview. Brewed at the Ramapo Valley Brewery in Hillburn, N.Y., this wheat-free beer is reportedly healthier and tastier than other wheat-brewed beers.
“We’ve won several awards for the taste,” McIntosh said.
So why gluten-free beer?
“The gluten-free market in the United States is predicted to grow by $1.7 billion in 2010,” McIntosh said. “We get about 10 to 15 e-mails a day asking us for the beer.”
