Interview: ISK looking ahead to next sales goal for pesticides

Ishihara Sangyo Kaisha has a sales target of 70 bn yen ($9.1 bn) in fiscal 2015 for its pesticides business. Tetsuya Okabayashi, the company’s executive vice president and director of its Biosciences Sales and Marketing division, said that the objective was attainable through business expansion in the Americas, Europe and Asia. To continue to be competitive in the global marketplace, however, a further expansion in scale is needed, so ISK will progress to a future goal of 100 bn yen in sales.

How was ISK been performing recently?

Okabayashi: Our sales fell 9% in the fiscal year ended last March because of a poor showing in Europe, brought about by the strong yen and the emergence of generic products,despite a sales boost from healthy demand in the Americas, chiefly Latin America, for our fluazinam fungicide and flonicamid insecticide. Our domestic sales kept pace with the Japanese market. Now, about halfway through this fiscal year, our fluazinam and flonicamid shipments appear to have carried on their momentum overseas and overcome the yen’s effects. In Europe, the growth of generic products has weakened, possibly due to the registration system, so we are likely to aviod last year’s situation. We started full-scale sales of our flucetosulfuron paddy herbicide in Japan this year, with market penetration proceeding as planned.

Would you tell us about ISK’s business strategies for the future?

I think that we will realize oue medium-term goal of 70 bn yen in annual sales by garnering 20 bn yen in sales each in the Americas, Europe and Asia and 10 bn yen from our group companies in the pesticide business. We are especially focusing on Brazil and plan to use our increased market presence there to elevate our sales in other countries in the region like Mexico in Latin America and Canada in North America. Our European sales exceeded 20 bn yen in the past, so we will make efforts to reinforce and expand our market share. In Asia, we are projecting 14 bn yen in sales from Japan and 6 bn yen from other Asian countries. It is not easy to generate growth in the Japanese pesticide market but we will promote our products for rice cultivation, a major segment in Japan, and apple cultivation. We will capture demand in Southeast Asia and India by partnering with local sales companies to extend our reach.

How about the R&D of new chemicals?

We have in our pipeline IKF-5411, a bactericide for Botrytis Cinerea; IKF-309, a bactericide for powdery mildew, and IKI-3106, an insecticide for lepidopteran pests. We will register them as pesticides in Japan and abroad.

There is mounting demand for integrated pest management in farms.

We sell biological pesticides like Phytoseiulus persimilis, a natural-enemy pesticide, and Minitans WG (Coniothyrium minitans), a microbial bactericide, but biological pesticides have their limits, so we also sell agrochemicals like Teppeki (flonicamid) and Acaritouch, insecticides that harm only pests and not so much their natural enemies. We will put together integrated-pest-management solutions that include agrochemicals and biological pesticides. We are currently collaborating with agricultural ventures to find optimal cultivation methods that are suitable for the targeted crops.