September 5, 2018

Submitted by Unigrains

Today agricultural and food companies need to be aware of anything, anywhere that could impact their sales, their supply, their margins, and their short, mid, and long-term strategy. While it is already quite hard to follow the macro trends of our agitated world and their consequences – trade wars and FTAs, major political events, sanitary outbreaks, weather fluctuations in production areas, and consolidations – it is much tougher to get local signals. But our SME and mid-size businesses precisely need this level of understanding, such as to know who to rely on in the markets they target. As direct investors, we feel that our role is to help the managers of our invested companies have a clearer view and better ability to navigate in the fog.

Also, as investors, we do know that being shareholders of companies that produce, manufacture, and distribute gives us a unique and complete perspective on our markets, because we fuel our companies’ growth. Raw material issues, sourcing, industrial, supply chain, financial, HR, marketing, commercial, ESG, traceability – we see it all and try to be the best advisor and partner to the management teams we support.

Following this rationale, this is why Unigrains decided more than 10 years ago not only to build a fantastic international network, but also to support first time funds teams dedicated to our food and ag sectors in geographies that we needed to understand better. By doing so, we gained a local footprint in Africa, Latin America, India, and Northern America, with intentions to pursue this strategy in Asia. This way we enriched our added value to our portfolio with an ability to connect European companies to projects all over the world.

While our direct investment activity also evolves, as we enlarge our boundaries to the whole Euro Zone and are in exclusivity for acquiring Mecatherm, one of the world’s leading baking equipment makers, we keep building a food and ag worldwide web of our own. We continue investing in funds, as our new commitment to Phatisa Food Fund shows, but also continue to develop great relations with our fund pairs on all continents for fruitful collaborations: exchanging intelligence, sharing networks, or connecting our investee companies.

The Global Ag team often gives us the opportunity to share our progress in this strategy with our community, and for this we are very grateful. In the next Global AgInvesting Asia session in Tokyo, David De Almeida, international development director for Unigrains, will be presenting the group’s combined direct and fund of fund approach, as always hoping to trigger interesting discussions and to be challenged. Every discussion helps us build the future of what we do. We hope to see you in Tokyo.