On an extremely discreet and closed market, where companies are very little known to the general public, Catalin Bucur has come to own a trader that is competing with the likes of Cargill and Alfred Toepfer, with revenue in the range of tens or hundreds of billions of euros.
Brise Group joined the ‘big league’ of grain traders after having paid EUR2.4 million to buy wholesaler Comcereal Olt on the stock market more than two years ago.
The trader now owns silos, storage facilities and collection hubs where it can store up to 250,000 tons of agricultural produce in the south of the country. The capacity is similar to that of the multinational traders.
There are only a handful of Romanian-controlled agricultural raw material traders and they include Cerealcom Timis (Maria Simcelescu), Comcereal Vrancea (Gelu Scutaru) and United Grain Grup (Gabriel Barbalau).
Even though 2012 will probably not be as good as 2011 for agribusiness, the top competitors in this sector are making significant investments to gain as good a position as possible on a market that has proven over the last few years that it can no longer be ignored by local or international companies, either.
Brise Group’s plans to invest EUR10 million by the end of 2012 and is already building silos.
“In this business one cannot develop without a good infrastructure. There are still some areas of the country where we are not present and where we will take a clear position soon,” explains Angelo Nicolae general manager of Brise Group.
He has been running the company for nine months, after having been part of the management of Swiss-held seeds, pesticides and fertilizers maker Syngenta.
Brise’s officials did not say where the new silos would be built or what their capacity would be.
To compete with the major international traders, Brise Group expanded to Bulgaria last year. It is not the only one to have done so, as Agricover, another powerful company in this business has had operations in Bulgaria for over two years.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)