BEIJING - Alltech, one of the world's largest animal nutrition companies, said it will quicken the pace of its investments in the Chinese market and hopes to triple its sales in China within two years.
The company recently opened a new facility in Tianjin. After a $12 million investment, the first phase of the plant can now produce four kinds of animal nutrition products with an annual output capacity of 30,000 tons.
Another $20 to $30 million will be injected within two years to expand production capability.
The private company has been growing at 20 percent year-on-year for three decades and expects about $50 million to $60 million in global sales this year.
Pearse Lyons, Alltech's founder and president, told China Daily that to reach $1 billion in sales in 2015, the company must be active in China, the world's largest and one of its fastest-growing markets, and ensure that local production is better adapted to the market.
Lyons said that most of Alltech's products were extracted from natural plants, which could help improve animal growth and reduce pollution by some 80 percent.
"The clients in China are becoming more professional, more sophisticated, and looking for solutions," he said.
"I will be very surprised if we don't triple sales in China within two years," Lyons added.
Alltech has been in China for 16 years. According to Jiang Nan, general manager of Alltech East Asia, the trend in the animal husbandry industry will be to increase the scale of the operations and the quality of the breeding.
She also said the bottleneck in the animal nutrition industry is a raw material shortage. So Alltech has started investing in technology to convert cellulose to energy, and use yeast and minerals more effectively.
In September, the company acquired the fermentation facility of Martek Bioscience Corp, the largest algae producer in the United States, to develop new proteins.
"One of our goals is to help animals away from reliance on grains and more onto cellulose and algae," Lyons said.
"For countries like China, which are short of soya and corn, these technologies from Alltech provide alternatives," he added.
Lyons said Alltech is the seventh-largest animal nutrition company in the world and will strive to become No 3 within five years.
Credit supply may top govt targetsWang Feng, chief consultant for Jiangxi Zhengbang Co, which earned 4 billion yuan ($600 million) in feed sales in 2009, said the animal husbandry market is large, but animal nutrition products have not yet been widely accepted.
"In China, 600 million tons of pork are consumed annually, but currently most pigs are fed on traditional feeds without additives," Wang said. "Animal nutrition products are new in China."
Ding Yajun, director of the Beijing office of the London-based Grain and Feed Trade Association, said the high-end animal nutrition market is not fully developed in China.
"If Alltech pays attention to the environment and engages in developing nutrition products for creatures like fish and shrimp, it can be very promising in this emerging market," Ding said.
