JBS SA has acquired Primo Group, the largest producer of ham and bacon in Australia and New Zealand. The move, reports Bloomberg, allows the company to increase its exports to Asia.
Australia currently exports minimal quantities of pork to the world’s biggest consumer of the meat because of the lack of certification for local products and tariffs of as much as 20 percent that will be removed by 2018 due to a free-trade agreement announced between Canberra and Beijing this week.
“People have money and therefore they’ll demand more high-quality meat,” Zhangyue Zhou, a business professor at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, told Bloomberg. Changing tastes will also support Australian exports as urban residents show more interest in “products like bacon that Chinese people don’t normally eat,” he said.
In a separate transaction, JBS SA also acquired AMSE02 Participacoes Ltda., a Brazilian company that owns Gruppo Big Frango, a poultry processor that slaughters about 460,000 birds a day. The cost of that acquisition was $169 million.
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