Anco capitalizing on antibiotic reduction trend in Brazil
The company has chosen Sao Paulo as the location for the business.
Marcelo Blumer, executive director, Anco Brazil, said now was an ideal time to enter the Brazilian market. He noted 2016 had been a particularly bruising year for Brazilian agribusiness, but livestock producers there were now looking for products that will give them increased operational agility so they can stay competitive while meeting increasing demands for a reduction in the use of antibiotic growth promotors (AGPs).
He said the Anco FIT product line would support producers in that regard as it “relies on bioactive substances in the formula that reduce negative stress reactions, such as oxidative stress, inflammation, reduced gut integrity and reduced feed intake.”
The line was developed, he continued, to boost gut agility in farm animals and empower them to adapt to nutritional stressors efficiently.
“Gut agility is term coined to describe the animal’s ability to adapt to nutritional stressors in a faster and more energy-efficient [way] than it normally would.
“When challenged with nutritional stress factors, stress reactions such as oxidative stress, leaky gut, inflammation and shifts in gut microflora will be triggered in the animal.”
Blumer told us more and more feed additive firms are leveraging the growing migration away from AGPs within the Brazilian livestock production sector.
Though entering the Brazilian market is not painless, he said. The excessive bureaucracy involved in setting up a company there is one of the major constraints to doing business in that country, he said.
“With regard to the technical level of our customers, the requirements are also very high.”
Anco has been recruiting locally, bringing in experts who have long-standing relationships with the feed and livestock sector in Brazil as a strategy to create a favorable start-up environment for the company and to minimize adversity in the initial phase.
He said the recent scandals actually provide a platform for Brazil to “definitively solve its systemic problems of excessive bureaucracy, which generates corruption and a lack of efficiency, and open [up the] space for a [business] environment of greater security and competitiveness.”
Local trials
Anco Brazil’s initial target markets are poultry and swine. It has been testing its additives in relation to how they perform in those segments in Brazilian research facilities as per the market preference for trials conducted under local conditions.
Another reason for the focus on swine and poultry to begin with is the expertise of the local team, as it currently stands, is better suited to those segments, said Blumer.
“The ruminant market is very important [to us], but we need to organize our structure [to be fully able to target that segment]. Our expectation is that we will be ready for the ruminant market by next year.”
Anco Brazil will also serve other markets within Latin America, such as Paraguay, due to its proximity, he said.
“Our medium-term [goal is to open] a production plant in Brazil.”
