How Did Biological Companies Perform in 2024?
Editor’s note: Each year, 2BMonthly’s State of the Industry feature includes a Q&A with executives from leading biocontrol and biostimulants companies worldwide. The 2024 feature touched on a wide range of prevailing topics including the investment climate for biologicals, where the industry’s biggest innovations are likely to come from, and the ongoing challenges related to the European regulatory climate. In the excerpt below, experts offered their insight on how business in 2024 compared to the prior year.
Q: How did your business in 2024 compare to the prior year?
Laia Cortel, Plant Health Director, Bioiberica: Our performance in 2024 surpassed that of 2023, marking another year of solid growth for our company. In the domestic market, we achieved an increase of over 10%, despite facing more than two consecutive years of recurrent droughts that particularly impacted Southern Europe. In export markets, we saw a steady growth of around 8%. China emerged as a significant new market for us this year, while Latin America continues to solidify its position as one of our most important regions year after year. These results reflect our commitment to innovation and adaptability, even in challenging climatic and economic conditions.
Daniel Zingg, CEO, Andermatt: Although global economic turbulences and bad weather conditions had a negative impact on our business in several regions of the world, we were able to achieve double-digit growth as a company group in 2024. The situation was especially challenging in Brazil, where the negative effects of El Niño in 2023 led to unused inventories and returns in 2024. A decline in commodity prices and a weaker BRL against the USD further impacted the business. The effects of La Niña in 2024 resulted in delayed plantings. All of these effects led to payment delays by farmers and distributors, resulting in a credit risk for the entire industry and we were happy to manage these challenges without more serious effects on future business development.
Sarah Reiter, EVP, Commercial Development, BioConsortia: 2024 was a momentous year for BioConsortia. As you know, BioConsortia is an R&D company, so we measure business success as technical and partnership advancement. We advanced our nitrogen-fixing microbials business by launching to New Zealand with our partner H&T. This marks our first commercial launch with this technology. We continued to advance our collaboration with Mosaic Company for that nitrogen-fixing technology in row crops, with expanded testing in USA and in new markets like Brazil and Canada. We also secured EPA approval for our biofungicide, AMARA – much anticipated! And completed the submission package for our second biofungicide, GARNET. Our nematicide pipeline continued to confirm our belief that it is among the most compelling in the industry, with impressive results in nematicide field trials in USA and Brazil, particularly in terms of yield improvement under the pressure of nematodes and soil insects. Progress in 2025 will set us up for a big year in 2026 both in terms of key regulatory submissions and commercial agreements.
Jim Thompson, Director of Business Development, Global Green Solutions, AMVAC: AMVAC’s GreenSolutions portfolio had a very successful year with our global revenues growing more than 20%. Our growth was driven by strong organic growth in our LATAM and U.S. regions specifically. Our LATAM team has developed a very strong biological portfolio which is being sold in concert with our traditional ag chemical products to both distributors and growers through Central America and South America. In the U.S. we experienced strong growth in both our non-crop team (AMGUARD Environmental Technologies) and our U.S. Crop team. In spite of economic pressure in several regions such as China, Mexico, and Brazil, we were still pleased with the aggregate growth rate we saw in 2024.
Eduard Vallverdú Vidal, CEO, Sustainable Agro Solutions (SAS): 2024 has consolidated the positive trend we started by the end of 2023. We have observed a positive evolution in most of the regions. However, the complexity of the business is also growing, geopolitical situations, climate events, growing competition, regulatory changes etc. bring more challenges to the growth. We have managed to overcome them successfully but this requires investment and efforts.
Enric Bonet, Managing Director, Manvert: Business has evolved positively throughout 2024 although we observe a higher pressure in decreasing margins due to higher competition in biostimulant sector in addition to sales pressure from big companies invested in biostimulants trying to sell to afford their investment. These companies have started to press their distribution network to purchase their biostimulant portfolio in order to get advantages or discounts on pesticide products from the company’s portfolio. Cross -selling imposed and conditioning access to some premium products from multinational companies.
Frederic Beudot, Vice President, Biologicals, Corteva Agriscience: More and more farmers adopt Biologicals as another critical tool to use as part of their integrated pest management and soil health systems. As a result, we saw interest in our Biologicals offering continue to increase throughout 2024 and are expecting double-digit EBITDA growth for the year. Biologicals can extend the efficacy of synthetic chemicals when used in rotations, improve soil health, enhance resistance management, and enable plants to better utilize all the resources around them, all things that make the plant stronger and more resilient. We’re excited by the future of this technology and what it can mean for growers.
Frederic Chagnon, President & General Manager, Plant Care Business Unit, Lallemand: There is no doubt that 2024 was tougher than 2023, owing to the knock-on effects of the drought in Brazil in 2023 and the soft commodity prices. While 2025 looks like it is going to be a good year in LATAM, we have not seen the end of the market shakeout — there will be further consolidation in LATAM throughout the value chain. In other parts of the world, we had quite a good year.
View more expert insight on the state of the biologicals industry here.
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