Olam International Restructures Overly Diversified Business
Background
Olam International Limited is a Singapore agri-business company, majority owned by the Singapore government sovereign fund Temasek, and focused mainly on agri-business products.
Foods sold by the company range from edible nuts to cocoa, coffee, and rice, wheat, and packaged foods, and are distributed to 70 countries worldwide.
Business Description
OLAM is a Singapore based agri-business group with four major divisions and sources 37% of revenue from its biggest segment food staples and packaged foods.
Another 31% comes from confectionary and beverages, which is mainly cocoa and coffee combined. Edible nuts, spices and vegetable ingredients account for 17% of revenue. The rest of the company’s sales are from industrial raw materials, logistics and infrastructure.
The group distributes these products to 70 countries and supplies some of the best-known global consumer brands including Nestle, Lavazza, Hersheys, PepsiCo, KraftHeinz, and Mars.
It is the largest supplier by volume of cocoa beans in the world, the largest grower of almonds, the largest supplier of cashews, and is the second largest supplier by volume of coffee.
The company has recently begun to streamline some of its broad portfolio of food products to focus on its core, more profitable segments.
Leadership
Lim Ah Doo was appointed the Chairman of OLAM at the beginning of 2017. He also currently serves as Director of Singapore Technologies Engineering Ltd (STE SP), GDS Holdings Limited and few other organizations. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Engineering from Queen Mary College at University of London and Masters of Business Management from Cranfield School of Management in England.
Sunny Verghese is the co-founder of OLAM and has served as its CEO since 1996. He has won several awards including ‘Outstanding Chief Executive’ at the Singapore Business Awards in 2007, ‘Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year’ for Singapore in 2008 and ‘Best CEO of the Year 2011’ at the Singapore Corporate Awards. His education background is extensive with multiple degrees, certifications and training programs completed in the field of Agriculture, Accountancy, and Management.
World Class Benchmarking
Profitable Growth has been slowly recovering since it dropped to #10 in 2015. In the past 12 months, OLAM’s Profitable Growth ranked at #8.
Profitability has moved the same in ranks as Profitable Growth since 2015. Growth has seen a good recovery, ranked at #2 since 2016.
Asset utilization has ranked either average or below while Profit margin has ranked consistently below average.
Both Sales growth and Margin change have experienced heavy fluctuations but are currently ranked relatively highly at #1 and #4 respectively.
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