Sucden and TRIO Group of companies sign final terms for major Russian sugar venture
At the end of May 2019, leading French soft commodities group, SUCDEN, signed final terms with TRIO Group of companies to jointly own Yelets Sugar Plant. As part of the finalized agreement, SUCDEN acquires a majority stake in TRIO's sugar business and beet growing areas.
SUCDEN and TRIO Group, who have more than 10-year history of cooperation in such matters as supply of sugar and exchange of experience in generating solutions for sugar production development, agreed on a strategic partnership in Russia, where SUCDEN will become the controlling partner of Yelets agricultural business and sugar plant through the company Agroservis.
The partnership between SUCDEN and TRIO Group of companies fits in with the strategic interests of the parties in the creation of a reliable production cluster in the Lipetsk region. Within the framework of the partnership, SUCDEN and TRIO Group will combine the competence and high professionalism of the two companies in TRIO Group’s assets in the agricultural business and sugar plant, in order to enhance the efficiency of operations by applying their best practices.
‘This deal will give an opportunity to strengthen our strategic positions in Russia and ensure a high level of reliability for our customers. As a result, our customers will benefit from synergies of this new major equity participation added to our agricultural and industrial Russian network’, commented Etienne Pelletier, CEO of SUCDEN in Russia.
‘TRIO Group intends to further develop the sugar business in Lipetsk region, strengthening the current strategic advantages and competitive positions of the business, which corresponds to the long-term development strategy of the company’, said Gennady Uvarkin, CEO of TRIO Group.
According to the terms of the deal, SUCDEN and TRIO Group will hold 51% and 49% of the share capital of the joint company, respectively.
The transaction will be completed upon receipt of government and banks approvals.
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ABOUT SUCDEN
SUCDEN is a private French group with a turnover of around $6 billion. It is global commodity merchant, grower, processor, logistics provider, distributor, trader, broker and ship owner. The group’s key activities are in sugar, cocoa, coffee, ethanol and derivatives brokerage. The company buys and ships around nine million metric tons of sugar. The Group’s headquarters are in Paris, and it has offices in more than 25 countries, as well as logistics and processing facilities in several locations in Africa and Latin America. In all, it employs around 4,700 staff.
SUCDEN entered the Russian sugar market in 1998 with the relaunch of an agricultural and industrial development initiative. It is one of the country’s top four sugar producers, with activities embracing agriculture, processing and distribution. The group cultivates 160,000 hectares of arable land and grows a mix of sugar beet, wheat, barley, sunflowers, peas and corn. It operates three mills, in the Lipetsk, Penza and Krasnodar regions of Russia. These have grown to process more than 3,000,000 metric tons of sugar beet a year. The resulting sugar production is now about 500,000 metric tons. SUCDEN’s mills and farming activities play a significant role in their local economies, with SUCDEN employing more than 3,700 people in Russia.
ABOUT TRIO GROUP OF COMPANIES
TRIO Group of companies is a full-cycle agricultural holding, which began its operations in 1997. The group includes the Sugar plant (Yelets) which went through a full cycle of modernization and has a production capacity of 10,000 tons of sugar beet processing per day, and a number of agricultural assets, including crop production, dairy farming and potato production.