“My ambition is to participate in the international grain tenders. We are now exporting 400,000 tons of grain a year, 80% of everything we buy,” he says.
Cerealcom farms 25,000 hectares of land, has 800 employees and its annual revenue stands at EUR80 million to EUR100 million.
Wheat exporters in Romania saw EUR468.3 million revenue in July-October 2013, an increase of 87% on the corresponding period of 2012. A total of 2.5 million tons of wheat left Romania in the four months or one third of the country’s harvest.
Cerealcom produces 150,000 tons of grain on its own and buys the rest of the amount it exports from the free market.
Mihai Anghel’s group is currently working on the construction of two 60,000 ton silos, an investment estimated at EUR10 million, for which it got a line of credit from Chinese banks.
The group based in Segarcea, a small town 25 kilometers south of Craiova in southern Romania, is one of the few Romanian producers exporting grain directly, as exports are usually handled by major international traders.
The long-term project of the entrepreneur is to become a real integrator in the south of the country and collect enough wheat, corn and sunflower seeds so as to be able to compete with agribusiness multinationals on equal footing.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)