Syngenta Japan: Looking at sales from farmers’ perspective

Syngenta Japan made a new start in 2010 by integrating its crop-protection and seeds business. Okifumi Murata, the company’s CEO, described the company as a unit of a multinational company, not a foreign company’s affiliate, and said that the group’s companies seek ways to achieve positive inputs in the agriculture sectors of the countries and regions in which they do business. The company’s maxim is to make contributions to Japan’s agriculture using its global resources.

About a year has passed since the start of the new business structure. How are the results?

Murata: We have seen several synergetic effects in R&D and sales. Pesticide sales had been conducted from the manufacturing viewpoint in the past but farmers’ viewpoints were added after the integration with the seeds business, and this will be a part of our sales activities from now on. For R&D, we have high expectations for results in the seed-treatment area. After only one year, when we look at all our businesses, some were only combined, so I think more synergetic effects can be generated in the future.

How about new-product development?

We launched several products over the past 1-2 years: Revus Flowable, a fungicide for fruit and vegetable cultivation; Cruiser, a soybean seed- treatment insecticide; Boxer, a herbicide for wheat and barley cultivation; and a paddy herbicide with mesotrione as the active ingredient. In particular, we are proud that our Apiro line of products, which include mesotrione, offer wide-spectrum activity, with high effectiveness against sulfonylurea-resistant weeds, but low environmental burden. We are projecting higher earnings this year than in 2010.

In R&D, Syngenta Japan came up with the new concept of “resistance breaking” agrochemicals.

Pesticides usually lose effectiveness over time as a result of their target pests gaining tolerance to them. To counteract this, various measures have been taken such as replacing active ingredients and adding new active ingredients, but we found that certain chemicals act as resistance breakers when added to other active ingredients to which resistance have been built up, by destroying the sites on the other active ingredients that are responsible for the resistance through interactions between the compounds. We have already applied this to our Chess insecticide. I have high expectations for our resistance-breaker chemicals, which will maximize the value of active ingredients and reduce the labor and other costs for R&D.

The export of domestic agricultural products is being promoted.

It may sound very new for Japan, which is highly reliant on imports for food supply, but peppermint produced in Hokkaido had been exported to many countries in the past. I recently became chairman of the Japan Agricultural products Exporter Association. To promote exports of our agricultural products, we have to clear various hurdles, such as promotion of the products and the easing of regulations on imports from the target export destinations. Farmers lack information on which products are important to which market. I would like to do my part to activate Japan’s agriculture sector by revitalizing agricultural exports through the association’s activities.

Source: JCWeb