Astarta Agro Holding, Ukraine’s largest sugar producer, will resume construction of an additional deep soybean processing line at its Globinsky Processing Plant (GPP, Poltava region) in the fourth quarter of this year, which will allow it to produce up to 100,000 tons of concentrated soy protein per year.
“The project was announced in 2021 at a cost of $50 million, and now it is estimated at about $60 million, taking into account inflation,” said Yulia Bereshchenko, Business Development and Investor Relations Director of the group of companies, at a conference call with investors and analysts based on the company’s results for the first nine months of 2023.
According to her, the investments will be spread over three years – this year and the next two, and the project will be financed mainly from free cash flow.
As reported, Astarta announced the start of construction of this line in mid-September 2021. The GPP itself was commissioned in early 2014, with a design processing capacity of 230 thousand tons per year, and will remain at this level. The plant is capable of producing about 160 thousand tons of high-protein soybean meal, 40 thousand tons of soybean oil, and 9 thousand tons of granulated shell annually. The enterprise also includes storage facilities for finished products and an elevator with a capacity of 42 thousand tons, as well as the necessary engineering, road and rail communications. Before the war, more than 80% of GPP’s output was exported to the EU, the Middle East and the Far East. Most of the soybeans for processing are grown by the agricultural companies of the agricultural holding.
In the fall of 2021, Bereshchennko indicated that the construction of an additional line for deep soybean processing at the GPP would double EBITDA in the soybean segment and increase revenue.
“Astarta is a vertically integrated agro-industrial holding company operating in eight regions of Ukraine. It comprises six sugar factories, agricultural enterprises with a land bank of 220,000 hectares and dairy farms with 22,000 cattle, an oil extraction plant in Globyno (Poltava region), seven elevators and a biogas complex.
In the third quarter of 2023, the agricultural holding earned EUR1.24 million in net profit, down 27.7 times compared to the same period in 2022. Astarta’s revenue decreased by 14.4% to EUR104.75 million, gross profit by 2.7 times to EUR26.96 million, operating profit by 7.6 times to EUR6.79 million, and EBITDA by 42.7% to EUR97.25 million.
Due to significantly better performance in the first half of this year compared to the first half of last year, in the first 9 months of 2023, net profit decreased by 9.8% to EUR 55.97 million, while revenue increased by 14.8% to EUR 392.00 million. The company’s gross profit increased by 3.0% to EUR 151.91 million, while operating profit decreased by 15.9% to EUR 79.91 million and EBITDA by 10.8% to EUR 116.63 million.
