Masan and De Heus enter into strategic partnership in Vietnam
Masan subsidiary, Masan MEATLife Corporation (MML), and De Heus Vietnam have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) aimed at optimizing and driving productivity of Vietnam’s feed, farm, and food (3F) sectors.
Vietnam, which De Heus first entered in late 2008, has the fifth largest feed market in the region. It is also one of the world’s top pork consuming countries.
Supporting independent livestock and aquaculture farmers and ensuring their competitiveness in the medium and long-term is a major priority for both companies.
MML will focus on the branded chilled meat business, it wants to create a 3F operating model to ensure safe, innovative, and affordable chilled meat products are available to Vietnam’s 100 million consumers.
De Heus Vietnam will champion animal nutrition, genetics and husbandry related innovation.
The partners are setting up a steering committee to discuss their various joint initiatives.
Danny Le, CEO of Masan Group and chair of MML, said the partnership could contribute in a significant way to the modernization of Vietnam’s animal protein infrastructure, leaving it on par with those of developed countries.
Gabor Fluit, CEO, De Heus Asia, noted that higher regulatory standards are being implemented in Vietnam’s animal protein value chain in terms of food safety, biosecurity, traceability, animal welfare and antibiotics usage. “In the meantime, it is also crucial to promote the competitiveness of the country’s animal protein products. To achieve this, it is important for the various links in the value chain to work more closely together.”
ADM expansion in Vietnam
The Vietnamese feed market has been attracting foreign investment for a number of years.
In April, we reported that US agribusiness group, ADM, had acquired a Vietnamese premix player, and in doing so would strengthen its industrial and commercial coverage in that key feed market.
Wisium, part of ADM’s international premix brand, acquired Golden Farm Production & Commerce Company Limited, a producer of a range of vitamins and minerals premixes for swine, poultry, ruminants, fish, shrimp, and pets.
“Vietnam is one of the biggest markets for the animal industry in South East Asia, open to all variety of species. It has experienced a tremendous volume growth over the last 20 years and will continue to grow while becoming a more integrated market, more mature and competitive,” a spokesperson for ADM told us at the time.
ASF challenge
In terms of how robust the Vietnamese market is now considering the challenges that have arisen from African swine fever (ASF), the ADM representative noted then:
“Vietnam’s economy has performed consistently for the last 20 years as its people are seeing improved purchasing power year after year and, subsequently, increasing consumption of meat and seafood. ASF has been a serious challenge for more than two years, and is reshaping the whole sector, which is transitioning more and more to large scale farming, with those bigger operations better able to apply biosecurity measures. Smaller farms are having a very difficult time, as many of them have suspended or stopped their activity.
“The Vietnamese market is very resilient though. We strongly believe in the capacity of farmers and feed producers there to react quickly and positively to the challenges they regularly face.”
