Sucafina acquires Mercon's Vietnamese subsidiary! Will increase the influence of Vietnamese coffee

In December, Mercon Coffee Group, one of the world's largest coffee traders, filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 in New York after experiencing a "challenging operating environment" in the coffee trade, Reuters reported.

It is understood that Mercon has operations in all major production areas, including Brazil, Vietnam and Central America, but in recent years it has encountered many problems such as disruption of logistics during the epidemic, frost and drought in Brazil, price fluctuations, rising currency interest rates, and so on, which damaged the company's financial position and eventually led to bankruptcy.

According to court documents from the bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, the total debt of Mercon and its subsidiaries in several countries is $363 million. The biggest creditors include several banks in the countries where Mercon operates, as well as trading companies in Brazil, Central America and the United States.

Recently, according to Bloomberg, another well-known coffee trader, Sucafina (Sukofina), will acquire Mercon's Vietnam subsidiary.

Mercon is headquartered in the Netherlands, while Mercon Vietnam was founded in 1998 to focus on the processing and export of raw coffee beans in Vietnam and is Mercon's trade headquarters in Asia.

Sucafina is also a global coffee trading company with subsidiaries and processing plants in Africa, Asia, South America and other countries. The company opened its first representative office in Vietnam in 1997 and established a Vietnam subsidiary of Sucafina in 2022, which currently has an annual production capacity of 50, 000 tons of raw coffee bean processing.

Moreover, Sucafina and Mercafe's factories in Vietnam are adjacent to each other, both located in Linton province in the central highlands. If the acquisition is completed, Sucafina's Vietnamese coffee business can be further expanded.

In addition, as can be seen on Sucafina's website, the company is currently mainly engaged in the processing and export of Arabica coffee in Vietnam, not Robusta coffee. For this acquisition business, some industry insiders believe that the acquisition transaction is in a period of rising Robusta coffee prices, and the Robusta futures price has recently broken through the $4000 mark again, reaching $4287 per ton. It is believed that Sucafina is interested in developing Robusta coffee business in Vietnam.

In recent years, Sucafina has been expanding its business, buying Sustainable Harvest, an American coffee importer, and CompleteCoffee Ltd, a British merchant known for supplying Costa Coffee. A majority stake. Offices have also been opened in China, India, Indonesia and New Zealand.

Recently, Vietnam has suffered from drought, water shortage and the Red Sea crisis, resulting in a reduction in coffee production, while Brazil has vigorously developed robusta coffee cultivation, and the market has avoided buying Vietnamese robusta coffee beans. have switched to buying Brazilian Robusta coffee beans. Therefore, the local coffee producers in Vietnam are very optimistic about the development and expansion of Sucafina in Vietnam, because it can enhance the international influence of Vietnamese coffee.

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