Sumitomo strengthens agriculture business

Japan's Sumitomo Chemical, a producer of patented pesticides and animal nutrition products, expects to grow between 10% and 12% in the agricultural segment in 2021, after making $3.5 billion in 2020. Brazil represents around $1 billion of the total, and the expectation is that the country will keep pushing growth in Latin America, where the company bought for $1.3 billion the operations of the Australian Nufarm.

The acquisition was concluded just after the beginning of the pandemic in Brazil, which put Juan Agustin Ferreira Espinosa, CEO of Sumitomo Chemical Latin America, on the edge. "I admit that I was very worried at the beginning. We had to integrate the teams remotely, but we were successful," he says. One year after, the executive is happy with the company's performance "despite a drop in profitability due to the exchange rate."

Of the 824 employees the company has in Latin America, 656 are in Brazil. During the pandemic, all employees started to work remotely, except for 150 at the company's plant in Ceará and the research center in São Paulo.

During 2020, Sumitomo invested R$50 million in the Ceará production hub bought from Nufarm. The money was used to build a 10,000-square-meter distribution center and two plants, one to make herbicides and the other fungicides, as part of its diversification plan.

With annual investment of $300 million in research and development, Sumitomo's agricultural business expects to have four new products by 2025, including biological products, which represent 20% of the company's global portfolio.

One of them is Excalia Max, a fungicide to control Asian rust, a common disease in...

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