COFCO

China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Corp, known as COFCO, will focus its overseas acquisition drive in the wine and sugar sectors to meet growing demand at home, a senior company official has said.

A Chinese company isn’t buying Smithfield. A shell company based in Cayman Islands is. Instead of a story about “China buying up the world”, this turns out to be a story of a precarious leveraged buyout deal by some large global private equity firms looking to borrow their way to a fortune.

China's Shuanghui International plans to buy Smithfield Foods Inc for $4.7 billion to feed a growing Chinese appetite for U.S. pork, but the proposed takeover of the world's No. 1 producer has stirred concern in the United States.

With a need to import 100m tonnes of grain each year by 2020, Beijing needs to invest in global agricultural markets, experts say

State-owned food giant COFCO Corp is likely to pursue more overseas acquisitions of sugar companies, its Chairman Ning Gaoning said on the sidelines of the ongoing National People's Congress in Beijing Thursday.

Beidahuang State Farm Group has started to plant soybeans on 13,000 hectares of farmland in Argentina, while COFCO says it is looking for opportunities to invest in Argentina and Brazil for grains production and in Australia for sugar production.

The Thai company is seeking to acquire four far north Queensland sugar mills, more than 6,000 hectares of agricultural land and other infrastructure assets owned by MSF Sugar

Pour faire face à une demande croissante de produits agricoles, la COFCO, première société de négoce publique chinoise, consacrera plus de 10 milliards de dollars à des fusions et acquisitions à l'étranger dans les cinq années à venir

"Because of the nation's limited agricultural resources, we have to look overseas," Jiang Hua, a COFCO board member said. The company is trying to connect China's consumer market with overseas supplies of commodities such as sugar, wheat and soybeans.

Elders has begun a sale of all its forestry plantations totalling 50,000ha across the country. Much of the land purchased is expected to be planted with sugar cane, bananas or returned to beef grazing, and COFCO and Wilmar International have indicated their interest.

Cofco Ltd., China’s largest grains trader, said it is seeking overseas acquisitions to help secure supplies of commodities including soybeans, wheat and sugar as rising domestic incomes spur faster food demand growth.

While foreign investment is nothing new in the Australian sugar industry, the rate at which foreign companies have been pouring money into the industry has caused some concern among canegrowers.