Sucden completes acquisition of a majority stake in Russian sugar business, TRIO Group
At the end of July 2019 leading French soft commodities group, SUCDEN, announced the completion of the transaction with TRIO Group of companies to jointly own Yelets Sugar Plant. SUCDEN becomes the controlling partner of Yelets agricultural business and sugar plant.
The deal creates a reliable sugar production cluster in the Lipetsk region to serve clients with excellence and allows for further development of the sugar business in the region.
This strategic partnership combines the strengths and competencies of the two companies in the TRIO Group’s assets in the agricultural business and the Yelets sugar plant, one of the top three sugar plants in Russia, in order to enhance the efficiency of operations through applying best practice.
According to the terms of the deal, SUCDEN and TRIO Group respectively hold 51% and 49% of the share capital of the joint company.
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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.