Bunge chief executive Greg Heckman spent most of his tenure — which started in 2019 — shrinking the business, selling underperforming assets and transforming the company into the king of cooking oils. Bunge operates the world’s largest network of crushing facilities, processing everything from soybeans to canola and sunflower seeds to make frying oil and animal feed.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year threw global commodity markets into disarray, boosting crop prices and cutting off supply. That created the perfect conditions for trading houses that buy, sell and transport the world’s agricultural resources — a market that’s dominated by the so-called ABCD quartet of Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., Bunge, Cargill Inc. and Louis Dreyfus Co.Article content“As we told the shareholders, everything is on the table,” Heckman said in an interview earlier this year.
Glencore has been trying to break the ABCD stranglehold by growing its own crop operations through Viterra. The Swiss commodities giant acquired Viterra for $6.1 billion in a 2012 deal that gave it grain assets in Canada and Australia. About four years later, it sold stakes totalling roughly half the business to Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and British Columbia Investment Management Corp.
Last year, Viterra spent US$1.1 billion acquiring U.S.-focused trader Gavilon from Japan’s Marubeni Corp.