标题: Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Sept 23, 2013 (II) [打印本页] 作者: choi 时间: 9-30-2013 15:56 标题: Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Sept 23, 2013 (II) (10) Bryan Gruley and Lucia Kassai, Bone Factory; How a Brazilian butcher shop becomes a $50 billion behemoth. http://www.businessweek.com/arti ... s-dot-beef-industry
Quote:
"Blood is everywhere in JBS’s vast slaughterhouse in Greeley, Colo, north of Denver. It’s puddled on concrete floors, smeared on workers’ white smocks, gushing from cattle knifed on the killing floor. The smell hangs on the air in a high-ceilinged room chilled to about 40F, where JBS employees in shiny black and white helmets toil at chopping tables along both sides of a conveyor belt. A sign identifies it as the “LOIN” line. With hooks in one hand and knives with flexible 6- to 8-inch blades in the other, they trim fat and pare as much muscle from the bone and vertebrae as they can, turning raw slabs into tenderloins and New York strips. 'Disassembly' lines like this one, relying not on robots but humans, are where JBS and other meatpackers make money. Profit margins are slim in the meat business * * * 'humans have not invented a machine that can debone a cow or a chicken as efficiently as a human being,' says Alan Alanis, a JPMorgan Chase analyst.
"The Brazilian brothers who run the company, Wesley and Joesley Batista, are famous for their serial acquisitions * * * The spree has made JBS [named for their father’s initials] the biggest foreign meat company on US soil, the world’s biggest producer of beef and chicken, and one of the largest pork producers.
Their father, JBS founder José Batista Sobrinho--no relation to embattled Brazilian ex-billionaire Eike Batista--"built the company from a small Anápolis butcher shop 60 years ago.
"Meatpackers zealously guard yield figures (the percentage of meat culled from carcasses), so it’s hard to know which are the most efficient. The Batistas say they’re as good as any in Brazil and close to the best in the US. * * * Generally, JBS says, a steer or heifer can yield 72 percent of its gutted weight.
JBS got into chicken business in 2009 by buying a majority Pilgrim's Pride (co-founded by Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim): "poultry offered enormous sales potential in developing countries, because chicken is cheaper than beef or pork to produce. * * * After JBS bought it, Pilgrim’s Pride returned to deboning breasts by hand. As with beef, making real money on chicken comes down to how the birds get sliced.
"The ad campaign [in Brazil] is part of the Batistas’ newest push to reposition beef as a branded consumer product such as Bud Light or Chobani. Unlike chicken and even pork, almost all beef is still sold as a commodity: red muscle in a white Styrofoam pan wrapped in clear plastic. The Batistas are betting they can sell branded products at higher prices and with better profit margins by equating quality and safety with Friboi, the name JBS has long been known by in Brazil. In the U.S., the company has branded products such as Aspen Ridge Natural Beef, from cattle grown without hormones or antibiotics.
My comment:
(a) This is one of the three feature stories of the issue. There is no need to read therest.
(b) Greeley, Colorado http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeley,_Colorado
(situated 49 miles (79 km) north-northeast of Denver)