Multinationals being major players in Latin American market

As a most-fast growing crop protection market over recent years, Latin America is no doubt a very attractive market to global agrochemical companies. According to the statistics of agrochem consultancy Phillips McDougall, the crop protection market value of Latin America reached $14.547 billion in 2013, nearly 27% up year on year over the $11.467 billion of 2012. The crop protection market of Latin America has been growing at double-digit rate in average over the last 5 years, which is far higher than other regions of the world. The growth in this region in 2013 was primarily attributable to the developed overall economy resulting from the globally continued growing demand for soybean and maize, as well as the continued growing GM crops and the worldwide raise of crop prices.

The fast growing market has attracted close attentions of large number of enterprises, where multinational companies, who have a sharp eye on the market and are very knowledgeable on marketing strategy, would of course took first action to capture the market. According to a rough calculation based on the sales indicators of the global agrochemical industry leaders in 2012, the crop protection product sales from the world top 7 agrochemical giants in Latin America accounted for above 90% of the total sales in the region, being respectively ranked as the following – Syngenta, Bayer CropScience, BASF, Dow AgroSciences, Monsanto, FMC and DuPont. The ranking simply shows that the market of Latin America has minimum space now left over for new players except for the relatively bigger market which may be still exploitable in Brazil, which is the 1st largest market in Latin America and the second largest market in the world. According to the statistics of Brazilian agrochemical consultancy AllierBrasil, the top 8 agrochemical enterprises in the Brazil have taken up approximately 72% of the total market in 2012; the balance was shared by more than 100 companies including the generic agrochemical companies from China and India.

 
This article is adapted from AgroPages' business magazine "2014 Latin America Focus", Please click here to download and view the full text.