Randers, 3 December 2015
Danish Crown and Westfleisch have been granted approval by the EU Competition Authority in Brussels to proceed with “WESTCROWN”, a joint venture which will be owned in equal shares by the two companies, and which will specialise in the deboning and sale of sow meat.
- I am delighted that approval has finally been obtained. Now we can focus on starting up production, which will hopefully be operational in early 2016. By investing in our own deboning facilities, we hope to secure better prices for our owners. More specifically, we are removing an intermediary step, which will improve earnings for our owners, said Kjeld Johannesen, President and Group CEO of Danish Crown.
Christian Leding, spokesman of Westfleisch SCE Executive Board, is looking forward to seeing the partnership develop:
- We are sure it will be a big win for both companies to join forces in sales and deboning of sows. We are ready to relocate our production from Schöppingen to the new premises in Dissen near Münster. We expect it will be a highly valuable step to have a joint organisation regarding sales and marketing and we can hardly wait to get going.
Danish Crown slaughters approx. 325,000 sows in Denmark each year. So far, these sows have been sold as half carcasses to buyers primarily in Germany. At the moment, Westfleisch operates a specialist sow deboning business in Schöppingen near the Dutch border with an ultimate processing capacity of 355,000 animals per year. In future, the joint venture will debone and sell the sow meat from the new WESTCROWN facility in Dissen, south of Osnabrück, Germany.
Danish Crown is a cooperative owned by approx. 8,300 Danish farmers, and is one of the top three meat exporters worldwide. Westfleisch’s members and owners comprise more than 4,200 farmers in the north-west of Germany, and the company is one of the top five meat suppliers in Europe.