AGT’s New Innovations To Canada’s Lentil Production And Market
Rebellion Brewery, one of Quebec’s first microbreweries, creates the ale. It is a famous beer prepared using lentils from AGT Food and Ingredients, a company that processes and supplies agricultural products with Murad Al-Katib as the founder.
Al-Katib instituted the company in his basement in 2001 and took it public (TSX: AGT) in 2007. A decade later, AGT has more than 40 facilities and sells into 120 countries around the world. Their income in 2016 was $1.9 billion. Its accomplishments come from an amalgamation of ambitious expansion into new markets, smart acquisitions, inventive business models and good timing.
As a result of Al-Katib’s work, Canada now crops 65% of the world’s lentils, which is not just a protein-rich-super-crop, however, it essentially nurtures the soil as it grows. Two elements justify the remarkable growth of the category in recent years. Firstly, thriving developing markets like India, Bangladesh, China, and Turkey, are lashing high demand. Secondly, new crop study at the University of Saskatchewan have furthered yields for Canadian producers, powering the supply side.
AGT shapes its business by linking suppliers and buyers around the world. “They’ve got multi-origin, multi-destination competences, which most players globally lack,” mentioned Steve Hansen, senior vice president and equity analyst at Raymond James.
AGT’s growth came as a consequence of its first global-scale book. The second is now focused on vertical amalgamation, buying key infrastructure up and down the supply chain.
In 2015, the company disbursed $57.5 million to buy Mobil Capital Holdings, which owned and operated Saskatchewan’s Big Sky Rail and Last Mountain Railway. Pooled with a previous acquirement, the deal gave AGT control of 683 km of track in the heart of the country’s pulsate. AGT now possesses trains and loading sites where farmers can drop their crop transports in Saskatchewan, along with a terminal in Thunder Bay, Ontario. The company charters a fleet of grain cars that can be handed off to major freight movers to connect the two. There is also a dissemination center in Tianjin, China, and a processing and storage plant in Mersin, Turkey, among other assets.
J C Loum
