Bloomberg BusinessWeek, June 11, 2018 (I)

choi

(1) Mario Parker and Javier Blas, Can a 153-Year-Old Cargill Reinvent Itself?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/a ... 3-year-old-strategy

Quote:

"Already the world's No 1 supplier of ground beef and the second-largest beef packer in the US, trailing only Tyson Foods Inc, Cargill is expanding aggressively into aquaculture.  

"MacLennan, who became CEO in 2013 * * * [under him] Several underperforming units are gone, including * * * extensive pork operations that it sold to meat processor JBS SA for $1.45 billion in 2015. * * * 'They’ve chopped a lot of wood,' says Todd Duvick, a managing director at Wells Fargo Securities LLC.

"MacLennan’s biggest shift so far is a large investment in aquaculture, a fast-growing source of protein. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations says farmed fish overtook wild catches as the main source of seafood for human consumption in 2014 * * * The aquaculture industry's revenue totals about $163 billion annually, the FAO says.

"with each new generation of the family—the [privately held] company is now on its seventh—the stake of each individual shareholder gets thinner.

Note:
(a)
(i) summary underneath the title in print: In the internet age, America's largest private company needs to be more than a middleman
(ii) Print and the online version are identical as to text, but the former has 2 (insignificant) photos and a table, which is recreated below.

"The World's Top Agricultural Commodities Traders
The so-called ABCDs [from the first letter of company names] have long ruled agribusiness

..........................Archer-Daniels-Midland Co ..........Bunge Ltd .......................Cargill Inc .......................Louis Dreyfus Co
Year founded ...1902 ...............................................1818 ................................1865 ................................1851
Headquarters ....Chicago .........................................White Plains, NY……….Wayzata, Minn ………...Rotterdam, Netherlands
Employees .......31k .................................................32k ..................................155k ................................19k
Revenue* .........$60.8b ............................................$45.8b .............................$109.7b ...........................$43b
income* ...........$1.6b ..............................................$160m ..............................$2.8b ...............................$317m
Ownership .......Listed on the NYSE since 1924; ....Went public in 2001 in ....Privately held; the ……...Privately held; controlled  
..........................State Farm, with a 10 percent …….New York when the …....Cargill and ……………..by a trust on behalf of the
..........................stake, is the largest shareholder …..controlling families …….MacMillan own ………...children of Margarita
……………………………………………………...sold part of their stake ….more than 90 percent …...Louis-Dreyfus
What they do ….The biggest corn processor and ….Bunge is the largest …….The world's largest food...Big trader of grains and oilseeds
………………...a major ethanol trader, ADM is ….soybean trader in ………..commodities trader,  …....and the leader in raw cotton and
………………...also the most industrial of the ……Latin America -- and a ….Cargill acquired ………...rice, it's struggling and didn't pay
………………...big players ………………………..perennial M&A target …..Continental Grain in ……a dividend last year
…………………………………………………………………………………..1999 and EWOS in 2015

* 2017 RESULTS; CARGILL'S FISCAL YEAR ENDS MAY 31. DATA: COMPANY REPORTS, BOND PROSPECTUSES, CREDIT RATING REPORTS, BLOOMBERG RESEARCH."

(A) Wayzata, Minn is a suburb of Minneapolis.
(B) Archer, Daniels and Bunge are all founders' surnames. "In 1923, Archer-Daniels Linseed Company acquired Midland Linseed Products Company" to form Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. en.wikipedia.org.  Linseed is another name for flaxseed.
(C) Léopold Dreyfus, the 18-year-old son of an Alsace farmer, founded the company named after his father. Somehow his descendants got the hyphenated name Louis-Dreyfus -- even his name became Léopold Louis-Dreyfus. But I could not find how and when the hyphenated name first appeared. I assume that the surname name change for Léopold was  done after his death, to be consistent with his descendants. The en.wikipedia.org for Léopold Louis-Dreyfus says, "By 1900, the Louis Dreyfus Group was the world's largest grain trader." Due to Jewish heritage of the founder clan, Vichy government forfeited the company. Margarita Bogdanova was born in 1962 in Leningrad (now St Petersburg). She "was orphaned at the age of 11 when her parents died in a train accident. Raised by her grandfather" and learned accounting in a trade school, and became a "circuit board seller." per Financial Times. In 1988, on a Zurich to London flight, she met Robert Louis-Dreyfus (1946 – 2009; died of Leukemia) -- the great grandson of Léopold. They married in 1992.

() "William Wallace Cargill pioneered the modern agricultural trading industry in 1865 * * * And the roughly 100 members of the founding Cargill and MacMillan families who still own the company have become fabulously wealthy, with 14 billionaires among the ruling clan"

Brian Solomon, The Secretive Cargill Billionaires And Their Family Tree. Forbes,com, Sept 22, 2011
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bri ... -tree/#705c964c3f0e
("The other side of the family comes from the children of WW's [first and middle initials of the founder] daughter, Edna (who married John MacMillan)" )
() " 'The days of "Hey, we're going to buy your crops, we're going to store it, we're going to play the carry"—you know, sell it at a profit—it's over,' says Cargill Chief Executive Officer David MacLennan."

definition and meaning of carry as a noun:
(i) The Carry Strategy to Capture Better Returns. Morgan Stanley, Oct 18, 2016.
https://www.morganstanley.com/ideas/cross-asset-carry-strategy

Quote: "Commodities traders 'carry' the cost of holding, say, copper ore in terms of storage and other overhead expenses, in hopes of selling at a much higher price later, thereby turning the cost into a higher return, but it can apply to virtually every asset class, including stocks, bonds, currencies and others.  How does it work? 'The way we think about it is: What is the expected return of an asset class over a period of time, such as a month or a quarter, all things being equal?' says [Morgan Stanley's Chief Cross-Asset Strategist Andrew] Sheets, adding that most investors use futures to measure carry, ie, the price quoted now vs the price other investors believe it will have at a certain date in the future—the difference could be your carry return [positive -- hence, profit] or cost.

(ii)
(A) "The carry of an asset is the return obtained from holding it (if positive), or the cost of holding it (if negative)" Wikipedia for "Carry_(investment)."
(B) John Hintze, Carry Trading: Not Just for Currencies. Chicago Booth Review, Feb 25, 2014
review.chicagobooth.edu/magazine/spring-2014/carry-trading-not-just-for-currencies
("The notion of 'carry,' an asset's expected return")
(iii) I search the etymology of carry in finance in vain. Apparently the word is used in finance in its ordinary meaning, taking a hold, that is -- much like that in American football.