Blog

7 November 2017

A year in review – building the world’s leading sugar business

A blog from our CEO, Dr Mark Carr

Today we recognise the continued strengthening of our position in the sugar industry. With the key strategic decisions and structural changes made over many years now well established, we are able to confirm the strong operational performance announced in ABF’s year-end results today. This has been possible by choosing to provide the right products in the right markets, by ensuring strong operational performances through continuously improving both productivity and efficiencies of our advanced manufacturing plants[1] and underpinning all of this by carefully considered capital investments.

Following the acquisition of the balance of shareholding in Illovo we have supported them in gathering knowledge of their local markets and accelerating their product offering across B2B and B2C customers. In conjunction with this, capital investment decisions have been made, for example in our refining plant in Zambia doubling the factory’s annual refined sugar production capacity to ensure we continue to meet their needs.

The sale of our South China operations has given us the opportunity to maximise focus on driving efficiency and commercialisation in our beet operations in the North.  As a consequence the profitability of sugar beet in comparison with other crops has been improved to the extent sugar from beet now competes favourably with that produced from cane in the South.

For Germains, one of the world’s leading seed technology suppliers, the increased focus on the horticulture sector has resulted in rapid growth and this now accounts for around 50% of its business. This is a major change to five years ago when Germains’ business was predominantly focused on beet sugar seed technology.

Looking ahead

As one of the leading industry players we remain committed to creating long-term stakeholder value and are looking to the future with confidence and ambition.

At the heart of that ambition is our people. Evolving the capabilities of our teams has been, and continues to be, very important to us. With complexities in the sugar markets, new technologies and trends, alongside changing consumer and customer demands, we will continue to invest in diverse skill sets across our team as well as looking outside our industry to secure new capabilities.

Our focus on performance improvement will become even further embedded into our culture. Our efforts remain to build more conducive partnerships with our growers to ensure that both sugar cane or beet is a sustainable and profitable crop for them. Meeting the changing needs of our customers and consumers will become ever more important and will help us shape, grow and contribute to the communities we operate in.

We will continue to progress our sustainability journey with each of our businesses. We are proud of what we have achieved so far but we need to do more in consuming resources responsibly, with particular focus on water stewardship and managing our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across our supply chain. We will seek new innovations and ways that we can lessen our footprint impact as a responsible business.

We have vast expertise and knowledge and have every opportunity to become even stronger in 2018 and beyond.