Wilmar International

[yohowslife]

fourth quarter better than expected. 2015 looks poised to be a better year for wilmar. full article below.


http://www.investark.com/Analysis20wilmar2014.html

[BlueKelah]

CNY is coming.

More will be using cooking oil, flour, sugar, soya bean, rice, canola oil, olive oil, wholemeal bread. Did I missed anything?

Yes money for ang pow!!!

[greengiraffe]

New-look Goodman Fielder to be Asia's food champion
Sue Mitchell
485 words
18 Mar 2015
The Australian Financial Review
AFNR
English
Copyright 2015. Fairfax Media Management Pty Limited.

Goodman Fielder's new owners are aiming to turn the struggling consumer foods giant into one of the leading food companies in Asia after completing a drawn-out $1.3 takeover offer.

Goodman Fielder's new chairman, Robin Nicholson, has flagged plans to leverage the extensive distribution footprints of Singapore-based edible oils company Wilmar International and Hong-Kong based investment company First Pacific in China, Indonesia, the Philippines and south-east Asia to export Goodman Fielder's market-leading brands.

Wilmar is Asia's largest agribusiness group, with interests in edible oils, sugar milling and refining, grain processing and consumer foods, while First Pacific owns 50 per cent of Indonesia's largest food company, Indofood.

The first brand to start selling in Asian supermarkets and convenience stores will be Goodman's Meadow Fresh UHT milk, which is made in New Zealand. Other brands such as Meadow Lea margarine, Praise mayonnaise and White Wings flour are likely to follow.

"We're very positive about this opportunity to expand Goodman Fielder from the premier Australian/New Zealand food company to one of the leading Asian food companies - that's our objective," said Mr Nicholson, an executive director of First Pacific.

"We want to integrate Goodman Fielder into our own operations and take advantage through the combined entity of the scale and the resources, and the distribution power that we have across Asia," he said.

Wilmar and First Pacific are also investigating opportunities to bring some of Indofoods' brands, including packaged cake mixes, to Australia. "If there are suitable products people here would like we'd look to bring them in," he said.

Goodman's entire board, including CEO Chris Delaney, resigned on Tuesday after Wilmar and First Pacific completed the acquisition, almost 12 months after making their offer.

Mr Delaney, who had been CEO since 2011 and was keen to stay on to complete an ambitious turnaround plan, has been replaced by Scott Weitemeyer, the chief executive of Wilmar's Sugar Australian business.

"Scott will work with the dedicated team at Goodman Fielder to begin building a leading Asia-Pacific consumer foods business," Mr Nicholson said.

Goodman's chairman, Steven Gregg, has been replaced by Mr Nicholson, while Wilmar's chairman and CEO, Kuok Khoon Hong, and First Pacific non-executive director Graham Pickles, have been appointed to the Goodman board.

Mr Nicholson said Wilmar and First Pacific had no qualms about increasing their investment in Australia at a time when supplier margins are coming under unprecedented pressure as Woolworths, Coles and discounter Aldi battle for market share. Earlier this year Goodman, which has suffered a 50 per cent drop in baking profits over the past few years, agreed to slash the price of its leading bread brands and move to an every-day-low-price model at Coles and Woolworths.


Fairfax Media Management Pty Limited

Document AFNR000020150317eb3i0001h

[ahyeh]

Wilmar warns of potential Australian sugar production shortfall

SYDNEY (April 8): Australia's sugar production during the 2014/15 season may miss official estimates as a result of recent dry weather across the northeast coast of the world's third-largest raw sugar exporter, Wilmar International ( Financial Dashboard) said on Wednesday.

Much of Queensland, which accounts for more than 95 percent of the Australian sugar cane production, received less than half the typical levels of rain between January and March, Wilmar said.

Australian sugar production relies on rains during the first few months of the year when rainfall is at its heaviest.

Less Australian output would support global sugar prices, which fell to more than six-year lows in March on ample supplies.

Benchmark raw sugar futures settled up 0.23 cent, or 1.8 percent, at 12.77 US cents a pound. Total volume exceeded 216,000 lots, more than double the 250-day average, preliminary Thomson Reuters data showed.

John Pratt, executive general manager north Queensland at Wilmar International, said the possible production shortfalls would not be evident for another couple of weeks, but he was concerned by the threat of more unfavourable weather.

"The El Niño pattern that is forecast would impact on probability of rainfall in the medium to long-term, so we will continue to monitor the situation and the potential impact on the harvest," Pratt said.

Australian sugar production during the 2014/15 season, which started July 1, was last month estimated to hit an eight-year high of 4.7 million tonnes.

http://www.theedgemarkets.com/sg/article...-shortfall

[greengiraffe]

Sugar hit
1711 words
11 Apr 2015
The Australian Financial Review
AFNR
English
Copyright 2015. Fairfax Media Management Pty Limited.

Commodities Queensland canegrowers have been struck by a triple whammy of bad news and it all starts with a country 11,000 kilometres away, writes Tim Binsted.

Kevin Borg is flat out on his sugar farm an hour south of Mackay ahead of the harvest in May or June. After a dry February he has one eye on the weather, looking for rain before the tall, green sugarcane is due to be cut. The other is watching turmoil 11,000 kilometres across the Pacific Ocean.

Political and economic upheaval in key exporter Brazil has driven the sweet commodity to six-year lows, hitting just 12¢ a pound this month, and parts of Australia's industry are already losing money.

"Growers are going to start feeling the pinch," says Borg, a third-generation canegrower. "People with money borrowed would be feeling the pressure."

Attention might be on hard commodities such as iron ore and coal, but another softer and sweeter commodity is also having a rough time. The drop in the sugar price is a big problem for thousands of growers and the government of Queensland, where most growers are based. The sickly state of the sugar industry illustrates just how surprisingly widespread are the consequences of the 45 per cent fall in the oil price over the past 12 months. It also demonstrates how the votality of currency markets far away can change fortunes at home. And just like Fortescue's Andrew Forrest has questioned the wisdom of the free market by suggesting Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton and his company should cap production of iron ore to lift prices, a similar debate is raging in the sugar industry between those for and against the regulation of sugar marketing.

Around the world, mountains of sugar are piled up at port waiting to be shipped to an already oversupplied market.

In the week ended March 3, the amount of sugar waiting to be loaded at Brazilian ports rose 4.5 per cent from a year earlier, to 846,460 metric tonnes, Brazil-based shipping agency Williams Serviços Marítimos told Bloomberg.

The federal government's agricultural research arm, ABARES, expects global sugar stocks to rise to a record 82.7 million tonnes in 2014-15. And the nation's biggest sugar miller, Asian giant Wilmar, is tipping a fifth consecutive year of oversupply.

"In Australia we have already broken the level where we will not be profitable ... we are in front of a very serious crisis," Wilmar Sugar boss Jean-Luc Bohbot says.

With the world already awash with sugar, powerful global forces are buffeting Australia's 6000 canegrowers.

After years of rapid economic growth in Brazil, which produces 21 per cent of the world's sugar and accounts for about 60 per cent of exports, the country is facing stagflation: a stagnant economy and high inflation. Economic growth last year slowed to about 1 per cent, while inflation recently shot above the official central bank target of 6.5 per cent, for the 11th time since 2011.

South America's most populous nation is also in the grip of widespread political unrest as the corruption scandal surrounding government-owned oil company Petrobras continues to dog the ruling Workers' Party.

One consequence of Brazil's reversal of fortunes has been a sharp devaluation of the Brazilian real. The currency has plunged to decade lows against the US dollar, insulating Brazilian canegrowers from the depressed global benchmark commodity price.

"The biggest play at hand [in sugar] at the minute is currency and the Brazilian real in particular," Rabobank analyst Georgia Twomey says.

"The global sugar price is about 38 per cent below the five-year average. In Brazilian [currency] terms the current price is just above the five-year average."

As a weaker real makes Brazil's farmers more competitive, the collapse in the oil price is also pushing cane grown for ethanol production into sugar mills.

Ethanol is a substitute motor fuel to petrol, and the drop in crude oil prices tends to take the ethanol price with it. For some cane processors this makes producing sugar instead of ethanol relatively more attractive.

Borg was born on a cane farm and he's seen the impact of low prices before. "In the 1980s we had very low prices. A lot of people struggled in that period and were sent to the wall. It is just going to get harder and harder," he says.

Australian sugar is the world's third-biggest exporter and will ship $1.33 billion worth of the sweet stuff abroad in 2014-15, according to ABARES.

Sugar is an important part of Queensland's regional economy, and pressure on cane growers adds to the list of economic woes hitting the sunshine state.

Queensland has suffered from the sharp downturn in the coal sector. Cyclone Marcia lashed the state in February causing hundreds of millions in damages. Now as canegrowers face dwindling sugar prices, Panama disease is threatening Queensland's banana industry.

While tectonic shifts in world markets batter local growers, debate is also raging about the merits of free markets and competition versus protection of local industry and the national interest. Nearly a decade on from the industry's deregulation, a fight has broken out between millers and growers over the end of a century-old monopoly sugar marketing arrangement.

The old deal guaranteed growers two-thirds of all the profit from sugar sales, leaving millers the other third.

Since Australia's first sugar exports in the 1920s, the commodity was marketed through a single desk until deregulation in 2006, after which Queensland Sugar Limited remained the major player, marketing more than 90 per cent of Australia's sugar.

Last year Wilmar caused uproar when it announced plans to pull its sugar from the member-owned, non-profit QSL and began asserting the cold hard fact of deregulation: growers own their cane, but have no legal economic right to the sugar.

Borg, who is chairman of the Mackay branch of industry group Canegrowers, says trust between growers and millers has taken a big hit due to the marketing changes. "There is a lot of angst in the industry. Grower confidence is probably at an all-time low," he says.

Wilmar's decision to market its own product from July 2017 has been followed by other foreign-owned millers Tully and MSF Sugar, casting doubt over QSL's future. Some growers claim Wilmar's proposed new joint-venture marketing company is opaque, and fear the Singapore-listed giant plans to gouge farmers.

Like many other growers, Borg has no choice but to take his cane to one of Wilmar's eight Queensland mills. He worries growers will be reduced to "peasant farmers" if the changes go ahead.

Wilmar, which entered the Australian sugar industry with the $1.75 billion acquisition of Sucrogen from CSR, rejects these assertions. It argues QSL is outdated, and claims it can secure better prices for itself and growers by leveraging its global trading network and expertise.

Wilmar Sugar Australia strategy head Shayne Rutherford says it is crucial for the industry that it does not forget the reason it deregulated in the first place.

In 2000 the sugar price was languishing and then-agriculture minister Warren Truss commissioned the Hildebrand report into the sugar industry, which was published in 2002.

"The industry was in a very tough place and it was deregulated [in 2006], frankly, to stop it from disappearing," Rutherford says.

Now: "We are heading into an environment that is not dissimilar ... we need to be competitive and that's what the new marketing proposal is all about. We can do a better job than QSL."

The unprecedented angst in the industry has prompted a Senate inquiry into future arrangements for the marketing of sugar, which will air its findings at the end of April.

Bohbot argues Australia cannot keep resisting the forces of change in world markets. He warns taking steps towards re-regulation would be hugely damaging.

"We should not underestimate the structural changes going on in the market, or Australia could miss its opportunity," Bohbot says.

He warns that shocks in the world market can drive dramatic changes quickly.

In 2000 Brazil was not a major player, Castro's Cuba was the world's biggest sugar exporter and the Soviet Union was the biggest buyer of the commodity.

Bohbot says sugar is a capital-intensive and low-return business, and growers and millers can only prosper if they work together. "There should not be any fear in Australia, there is a lot of strength here," he says. "But we should not be fighting the wrong battle. We will not benefit by millers and growers fighting."

Not all growers are opposed to the changes. Jamie Jurgens' family has been growing tomatoes in the Bowen region for 100 years, but 12 years ago he decided to diversify into sugar.

Despite the low price, he plans to expand his sugar operations to 1000 hectares.

He says the forward pricing model offered by Wilmar has allowed him to lock in part of his production at prices well above the current spot price.

"We've had a good relationship with Wilmar over the years that we've been working together. We need to get rid of the attitude that it is growers against millers," Jurgens says. "I see plenty of opportunity to improve returns in the industry by working together more closely, rather than keeping the mills at arm's length."

Wilmar and Canegrowers' representatives are due to sit down for talks on May 13.

While tensions simmer over marketing, growers will be intently watching the skies and the sugar price. Forward pricing for the next season is already below the $US400 a tonne mark, meaning many growers will be feeling the heat.

At the same time Queensland's cane regions have received less than half of their long-term average rainfall for the wet season, and forecasts predict low rainfall for the April to June period. This could mean there is less cane to sell at lower prices, with the world sugar market firmly in oversupply.

WITH MARK MULLIGAN

82.7

million

Amount in tonnes sugar stocks are forecast to reach in 2014-15.


Fairfax Media Management Pty Limited

Document AFNR000020150410eb4b0001e

[Behappyalways]

Wilmar calls up boats for almost all record ICE sugar delivery
http://sgx.i3investor.com/servlets/fdnews/51968.jsp

[random85]

1Q 2015 shows soybean crushing margins going up but CPO margins going down. Any value buddies has any personal forward views of the respective margins to share? Personally, I think/hope the soybean crushing margins recovery is sustainable. Read that CPO prices will recover but not sure how much to trust these forecasts...

Vested

[BlueKelah]

Palm oil on downtrend not yet reach lows, should follow oil price.

On another note, wilmar debt is quite high

sent from my Galaxy Tab S

[Behappyalways]

Not vested



Forget gold, the sugar price collapse is far more dramatic - and here's why
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/commo...psing.html

Wilmar calls up boats for almost all record ICE sugar delivery
http://sgx.i3investor.com/servlets/fdnews/51968.jsp

[cfa]

Is there any reason for the relentless selling ? Fundamentals seem unchanged .