Louis Dreyfus Commodities services

We originate commodities from all over the world through our extensive network of producers and several joint venture partnerships. In addition we own a number of farms and plantations, notably in North Latin America and South Latin America. Our major farm products are sugarcane, palm, oranges and lemons. We also operate farming land for soy, corn, wheat, cotton and, to a lesser extent, sunflower seeds, peanuts and rice. We firmly believe agricultural land is an essential investment to support our long-term strategy to secure origination for our processing assets and trading activities.

Since the 1990s our company has been investing in prudently located production and processing assets in every region we operate in. These assets help us to control the journey of products from farm to fork and the associated costs. Each of our Business Platforms manages the assets that support their product lines. Within each of our Regions we create synergies between the assets we own and distribution flows. Recent investments include greenfield sugar refineries in Indonesia and China, a soybean crushing plant in Paraguay and a cottonseed crushing plant in Brazil.

The Group’s products are transported by road, rail, air and sea, at every stage of the sourcing and production process, and also to end customers. Our Freight Platform handles shipments by sea for our own business as well as for third parties. Integration of this service enables us to control transportation costs, protect against supply risks and enhance synergies within the value chain. Our storage assets include warehouses and silos in a number of key locations within our distribution networks. As with logistics and industrial assets, integration of these assets allows us to control costs and protect against non-availability risks, also creating synergies within the value chain.

In every country we operate in, we have teams dedicated to researching every aspect of our products, from environmental conditions to weather and economic developments to consumption trends. We also have specialists focused on merchandising our goods to customers. Our expertise in research and merchandising has been developed over our 160-year history and together these skill sets give us unmatched market intelligence. We are able to share knowledge across all our Platforms, combining efforts between them that create value-added offerings for our customers.

We have been in this business for more than 160 years and we apply our experience to a broad portfolio of commodities. It includes Oilseeds, Grains, Rice, Feed, Freight, Finance, Juice, Cotton, Coffee, Sugar, Metals, Dairy and Fertilizers & Inputs. We participate in industrial scale sugarcane activities through Biosev, our sister company in Brazil, where we operate 12 sugar mills.