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Chaudhry, who started his career with the state-run trading firm State Trading Corp., joined Cargill in
1995 and held several leadership positions in India after serving five years at Cargill in Geneva in the
company founded in 1865. Edited excerpts:
Internationally Cargill is known as a food company, but in India you are primarily known as a trading
outfit. Why is it so? And is this likely to change in the future?
In India, we are actually a food company. We originally have been supplying or buying commodities from
India or into India. This was in the 1970s when India had a deficit in sugar and other commodities. Over
the years, we have evolved. We have gone into manufacturing and we have a reasonably sized asset
based here. Today we have three world-class edible oil refineries. We have plants for manufacturing
animal feeds, animal pre-mixes and we have a sugar refinery in a joint venture. We have some of the
leading edible oil brands. We have distribution and marketing for animal feeds and pre-mixes. And we
are into trading, of course, in commodities such as sugar, cotton and some other grains.
We manage supply chains. We manage the twice-a-year harvest but (also) a round-the-year need from
consumers by coming in the middle between the farmer and the producer of food to link commodities
to the end users.
Give us a sense of your size. How much of revenue do
you get in a year and if you could compare with 25 years
ago, how much have you grown by?
Revenue is important; but in a commodity organization,
where the price of the commodity has a big role in
defining the size of the revenue, it is not the sole indicator
of growth. Out of the $119 billion of the Cargill global
turnover in 2010-11 (ended in May 2011), $3.5 billion was
linked to business (in) India.
In edible oils, we have 15% of the branded retail market in
a business where the organized brands form 25% of all of
the oils consumed. This means we sell about 600,000 tons
of edible oils, most of which is imported.
What is on your agenda for the next few years?
We are in the food and agriculture space, which is relevant
today and is expected to stay so. We have the global
wherewithal, access to best practices and experiences,
technology and we have, over the years, built these
linkages in the Indian market. We do have the potential to
bring in a lot of products, to create products, to help our
customers create products which are going to be the need
of the consumer. And this could be across the food basket.
What kind of business expansion are you looking at?
For example, we buy corn from farmers and export it. Going forward, we could get into wet milling,
where we could be producing starch and glucose from corn. That evolution we’ve seen and experienced