The world of 'seed, weed and bug' companies

- Fertilizers play an important position, as the first need growers have when planning input purchases, but it demands huge amount of credit for farmers and dealers.

- Farmers concentration allows these to leverage financial resources from different sources

- Internationalization and newcomers towards CPS markets in large agricultural countries.

- Dealers that were traditional only in CPC now diversified and went to seed, fertilizer, services and trading business. Some also strongly involved in farming;

- Concentration on distribution with a smaller number of bigger dealers;

- Dealers expanding to other regions as a growth strategy (regional diversification)

- A new movement of internationalization of distribution;

- Dealers face an increase advantage of local presence and high-touch with farmers, developing personal relationships;

- More information and technology is available for dealers’ business;

- Dealers are more flexible to adapt business models and processes than agri-input companies;

- Trading companies are entering the CPS distribution business in order to guarantee origination;

- Cooperatives are getting larger, more diversified and more vertically integrated in the food chain;

- Cooperatives are expanding to new areas, some entering to compete with other cooperatives in their regions. Some of them are following their farmers, since they are expanding to frontiers;

- Creation of a Central of Cooperatives, consortium and other alliances to buy together (fertilizers, services, CP, seeds) and even to import directly and export directly (trading);

- Cooperatives becoming much more professionally managed;

So what are the impacts for CPS companies of all these changes? Wait for the next story, in two or three days! But I can tell… The impacts are huge!

The author is professor of strategic planning and food chains at the School of Economics and Business, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil (www.favaneves.org) and international speaker. Author of 25 books published in 8 countries and in China, “The World on the Tongue”. In this article want to thank Matheus Consoli for the contributions and also Markestrat team.