Marfrig must have year with lower costs and greater integration of assets

After purchasing 12 brands and assets of BRF last year, including Harvest and Keystone Foods, Marfrig now has the challenge of balancing your box and start putting the House in order to improve performance this year.
This is the expectation of analysts, who received the news about the increase in net debt and the poor performance of the fourth quarter with suspicion. "We expected a weak result, but came apart, with high costs and low margins," says Catarina Pedrosa, market analyst of Banco Espírito Santo.
To this mission of improving finances, the Group has since the end of last year with Sérgio Rial, new CEO, who came to replace Marcos Molina — current President of the Council — and give the company a more professional aspect and less on family management. "The Marfrig is leading this process, it shows that family businesses can be managed by a group of professional executives without losing the origins and seek solid growth as a multinational company," he said.
In a conference with analysts, Rial said the company's challenge this year is to consolidate the integration of the acquired assets and expanding sales force. "We recognize that this is not the time to analysts ' full confidence, we know we have to improve significantly the results of Marfrig, and our focus is on work for this and add even more value to our portfolio in 2013," said the Executive.
Catherine says that the company's main challenge this year will be to consolidate the acquisitions, ensuring product offerings, prices and the increase of the sales points. "All this logistics demand greater than they have today, because they will reach the smaller retailers and supply them requires a different logistics". According to her, the market expectation is that there will be improvement of the results in the final quarters of 2013.
Results
The impact of the purchase of assets of BRF was felt in the last quarter of last year, when the high costs of soya and maize on the market, plus some dead assets, recémadquiridos, the company's net loss to $ 284 million in the period. During this period, the company's Ebitda totaled r $ 405, 9 million, an annual fall of 22.1%, compared to the $ 521 million recorded in the last quarter of 2011.
According to Ricardo Florence, Vice President for finance and investor relations for the company, this year, with the larger process of integration of the assets acquired in 2012 and the full operation of the plants, the costs tend to be lower. "The Brazilian and North American grain yields tend to be records, which should help to reduce the pressure on spending," says Catherine.
Despite the underwhelming results in the last quarter of the year, the exchange of command in welcome by the market was Marfrig. "Although in practice should not be major changes, a more professional management gives more confidence to the market," says Catherine.
The year 2012 was not considered good for most companies in the sector of processing of animal protein, especially for selling pork and poultry. The BRF, for example, felt the impact of sales of assets, exchange rate variations and of high commodity prices in the second quarter, when profit fell 98% and stood at r $ 6.38 million, against r $ 497,9 million of the same period in 2012.