São Paulo – Guabi, an animal feed factory headquartered in the city of Campinas, in the interior of São Paulo, hopes to promote deals with Arab importers over the next six months, according to executive director Francisco Olbrich. The organisation is one of the three Brazilian companies to participate in Dubai International Horse Fair, promoted in the United Arab Emirates this month.
The company presented its line of horse feed at the fair. "The Emirates have a market with a potential of 5,000 tonnes a year, with 7,000 horses, not counting the neighbouring countries," said Olbrich to ANBA. "We made excellent contacts, there was interest by distributors and also by people interested in importing directly," he added, after his first participation in the fair.
Horse breeding and horse racing are greatly appreciated in the region. Dubai promotes, for example, one of the main horse competitions in the world, Dubai World Cup. According to Olbrich, the export manager at Guabi remained in the emirate after the fair to proceed with the business contacts. Representatives of the company also visited Egypt and Kuwait to talk to potential distributors.
Guabi completed 35 years in existence in 2009 and exports to over 30 countries. The executive director at the organisation said, however, that most of the foreign sales are composed of domestic animal feed. Promotion of feed for large animals abroad is starting to be promoted now.
The great problem of exports of horse feed, according to him, is the product shelf life: around 90 days. With the delay from production to receipt of the product by the customer, the product ends up with a short shelf life. In this respect, Guabi is implementing a new production process to expand the shelf life to five months, simplifying foreign sales.
Another differential is the price of raw material for animal feed in Brazil, essentially agricultural commodities produced in large scale in the country. The easy and relatively cheap access to these inputs makes the end product more competitive on the foreign market.
Guabi has eight factories that produce between 450,000 and 500,000 tonnes of feed a year and employs around 1,200 people. Apart from the line for horses, the company produces feed for cattle, birds, goats, sheep, pigs, fish, shrimp, rabbits, dogs, cats and domestic fowl.
*Translated by Mark Ament
