Dive Brief:
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Bunge Ltd., a global agribusiness and food and ingredients company, has filed for a potential initial public offering of its eight Brazilian sugar and ethanol mills, according to Food Business News. The White Plains, New York-based firm has been looking to shed the facilities since 2013 without success, Reuters reported.
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The company's sugar and bioenergy unit in Brazil owns and operates the eight mills in three regions of the country. They can crush 22 million tons per year and can also produce a mixture of ethanol and sugar. In addition, the facilities produce renewable electricity through cogeneration to power the mills.
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"It is a major milestone … in a sense that we have a business that is now prepared to stand on its own two feet, and it’s really a matter of when we activate that,” Soren Schroder, Bunge's CEO, said at a May 16 conference in Chicago, Food Business News reported.
Dive Insight:
This move reflects Bunge's desire to get out of the sugar and ethanol businesses and focus on agribusiness and food and ingredients. Raw sugar prices have hit a two-year low due to a glut of global supplies far exceeding demand. As a result, some Brazilian producers are cutting supplies from 36 million tons to 31.6 million tons this production year.
Reuters noted that Bunge's sugar business in Brazil hasn't sold because the company paid a lot for it and prices have been slumping. According to the Financial Times, Bunge shelled out $1 billion for the facilities back in 2010 with its acquisition of Brazilian sugar mill operator Moema. The gamble didn't pay off as bad weather impacted the crop, sugar prices fell and the Brazilian government reduced gas prices, thereby undercutting ethanol's appeal.
A successful IPO, should that come to pass, could stabilize the mill business situation and add a measure of control and stability, the company's CEO indicated.
"Up until now the Brazilian equity market and the economy was under a lot of flux. Things are turning for the better, and so the window for acting on something like that may be opening up,” Schroder told the Financial Times.
Bunge recently reduced its profit projections given the tough grain and sugar trade. The company revised total operating profit for this year to $758 million compared to an earlier $955 million. Reuters noted recent weak results have attracted takeover interest from Archer Daniels Midland and Glencore, a multinational commodity trading and mining firm based in Switzerland.
Given the overall scenario — failure to sell the mills, the current sugar glut and the refocus of company priorities — it seems unlikely Bunge will hang onto its sugar and ethanol business in Brazil for much longer no matter how the IPO turns out. In its first-quarter 2018 earnings report presentation, the company noted that it was in the process of "exiting sugar trading activities." Intentions don't get much clearer than that.
The money raised could potentially sweeten the pot for a future acquisition of Bunge's Brazilian mills by another company. It might also encourage other global agribusinesses to look twice at underperforming operations and take the IPO route for those proving difficult to spin off.