Karuturi Global Limited

Mr. Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi, Managing Director of Karuturi Global Ltd was awarded the Ernst & Young Business Entrepreneur of the year 2009 from India.

Mr. Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi, Managing Director of Karuturi Global Ltd was conferred with another prestigious award for business excellence in Agribusiness in Africa by CCA, Corporate Council on Africa, for the year 2009.

Mission

“To emerge as an integrated agri-products company servicing the world market through unmatched product, cost and quality advantages.”

we now aim to broad base our portfolio into a larger agri-produce basket. The acquisition of large tracts of land in Ethiopia has set the stage for us to become a complete agriculture production company. Our goal now is to make a significant contribution to elevate the global and african food prices.

Quality & Product Development

• Karuturi Foods equipped with state of the art Laboratory with testing facilities for chemical analysis.
• Pest Control activities has been monitored by an external agency in the plant.
• Pesticide residue control for all the fresh vegetables and for finished products.
• Strong traceability system adhered from the field and product recall procedures is in place.

Karuturi Global is today the largest producer of cut roses in the world, with are area of over 239 hectares under Greenhouse cultivation and an annual production capacity of around 555 million stems.

Karuturi In News
The Australian; February 08, 2010

Karuturi spreads his bed of roses

These are busy times for the world's biggest rose producer, India-based Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi.

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After a downbeat 2009, when the killjoy global financial crisis hit Valentine’s Day sales of flowers and chocolates, romance is back in business. Next Sunday, February 14, is the big one: D-day for flower deliveries, and the time when Karuturi and other global rose suppliers have cause once again to thank Scottish songwriter and poet Robert Burns for his unbeatable 200-year-old marketing pitch to sweethearts, “My love is like a red, red rose.”

Those rich red roses are the heart and soul of Valentine’s Day demand, which is why this one event accounts for a large slice of the $A33 billion spent annually on cut flowers around the world.

In the weeks and days leading up to February 14, Karuturi’s rose-growing estates in India, Ethiopia and Kenya are flat out cutting stems and shipping them to markets in Australia, Asia, the Middle East, Europe and North America.

It’s a business with big markups. Indian growers might get 6 rupees (A$0.15) per rose stem on the domestic wholesale market, while high-end exporters like Karuturi will get 20 rupees (about A$0.50) for a 60cm stem.

Twelve of those, deep red and matched with a dozen chocolates, will cost $99 home delivered in Australia this week from a popular online retailer such as RosesOnly. And if you simply must have a Saturday or Sunday delivery, add another $20.

In India, the typical Valentine’s Day retail price points are 500 rupees ($A12.50) for a home delivered basket of 12 red roses with chocolates, going up to 2500 rupees ($A62.50) for 101 red roses in a heart shape.

Despite Karuturi’s global imprint, India is not a major flower exporter. According to statistics from the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, floriculture exports in 2008-09 were just 3.7 billion rupees (about $A92 million), well down from a peak of 6.5 billion rupees ($A162 million) in 2006-07.

While India is a relatively low-cost producer, it lacks the scale that flower growers can find in African nations such as Kenya and Ethiopia. For Karuturi, founder and managing director of Karuturi Global, it’s all about volume: his long-stated goal is to produce 1 billion stems worldwide by the end of 2010. To do that, he has to be in Africa.

In Bangalore, which along with nearby Hosur is the flower producing heartland of south India, he has just 10 hectares producing 18 million stems a year – about half of which are exported to regional markets such as Japan, Australia and the Middle East.

In Africa, Karuturi has 75 hectares in Ethiopia producing 115 million stems, of which 90 per cent are exported primarily to Europe and the Middle East. In Kenya he has 154 hectares, producing 422 million export-only stems for Europe. He plans to add more land in Ethiopia this year.

After the global financial crisis hit rose sales in 2008-09, Karuturi is cautiously optimistic about the outlook for 2010.

“The global crisis affected all businesses – the rose business was no exception. But things are looking up again,” he told The Australian recently. Two years ago, when Indian consumer sentiment was at its highest and the GFC was little more than an ominous rumble in the distance, Karuturi could barely meet the demand in India for Valentine’s Day roses.

This is how he recalled the situation during an interview with The Australian in Bangalore in August 2008.

“This year (2008), for Valentine’s Day, we were embarrassed by the demand. In fact, it was crazy – we had too many orders. We had to stagger our deliveries from February 14 to 17. In 2009, we’ll be

    * Manoj Agarwal
    * Nagesh Karuturi
    * Prasanna Pai
    * Shyamal Adhikary
    * Ashok Kumar Sharma
    * Sanal Kumar
    * Mr. Hemanth Talathi
    * Mr. Satendra Kumar Tyagi
    * Mr. Subrota Mondal
    * Mr. Henry Muller
    * K.V.Gopala Krishnan
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