Unique produces flavours for a range of snacks and savoury foods, including soup.
Flavours specialist Frutarom has continued its acquisitions strategy with a $6.7 million deal for South Africa’s Unique Flavors.
Unique Flavors, which recorded sales volume in the past year of $9 million, produces a range of savoury flavours as well as sweet taste solutions. It operates a research and development, production and market facility in Pretoria – near Frutarom’s new South African site – and employs around 60 people.
Significantly, it has a number of activities in important emerging markets such as Ghana, Malawi, Zimbabwe and Mozambique – as well as its ‘wide customer base’ inside South Africa.
Frutarom will work towards merging its activities – including many of its R&D, sales and marketing, purchasing, production and supply platforms – and integrating Unique’s current management team into Frutarom’s management in Africa.
Frutarom CEO and president Ori Yehudai said: “The acquisition of Unique is the continuation of the implementation of Frutarom’s rapid and profitable growth strategy and the realisation of its vision to be ‘the preferred partner for tasty and healthy success’. The acquisition will contribute towards significantly strengthening our positioning in the rapidly growing regions of Africa, expanding the supply of our products to African countries and reinforcing our management and our R&D, production, sales and marketing capabilities.
“We intend to combine Unique’s R&D and sales and marketing platform in Africa with Frutarom’s global R&D and sales and marketing platform in order to realise and leverage the abundant cross-selling opportunities between their activities.
“We also intend to capitalise on the synergies and savings made available by combining Unique’s activity with Frutarom’s existing activity in South Africa.”
The acquisition of Unique is Frutarom’s second acquisition in Africa and follows the acquisition in 2013 of the flavours company JannDeRee, which was already been integrated with Frutarom’s South African activity.
In recent years, Frutarom has also made efforts to expand its activity in Africa on the basis of its manufacturing infrastructure and local R&D and marketing capabilities. Last year, the Israeli company inaugurated a state-of-the-art production plant and R&D centre in Johannesburg to serve customers in a number of growing markets.
According to Ori Yehudai, that activity will continue, as Frutarom looks to forge ahead with its strategy for growth.
He said: “We are working on seeking out and executing additional acquisitions of companies and activities in our fields of activity, with special focus on high-growth markets in Asia, Central and South America, Central and Eastern Europe and in Africa, with the share of our sales in emerging markets having grown from 27% in 2010 to over 40% in 2016.”
Frutarom hopes that the acquisitions, alongside internal growth, will help to contribute to sales of $2 billion and a pre-tax margin of over 22% in its core activities by 2020.
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