Miller Magazine Issue:114 June 2019

acquisition is a key factor in your growth. You have subsidiaries in different countries. Is there any acquisition plan in the near future? Do you have any plan to expand your business into the other European regions or other continents? Anyone who has followed the GoodMills story in the past decade would not fail to see the group went through a major growth period, via new acquisitions, turning minority stakes into majority or full ownership, renaming of old brands, purc- hasing of new brands to increase milling capacity. A lot of focus over the recent years, as mentio- ned earlier, has been to create the most efficient, integrated and low-cost supply chain possible for the group, and this is currently ongoing. However, GoodMills is no different from any ot- her business and acknowledges in order to survive, it has to continuously grow and adapt to this ever-c- hanging world we inhabit. Therefore, whilst we are not actively looking at any specific acquisition tar- gets, whether that be within Europe or outside, if an interesting opportunity was to present itself to the board, and was felt to be strategically advantageo- us, new acquisitions can never be ruled out. In Turkey, the world’s biggest flour exporter, many mills have been closed due to economic difficulties. While 475 plants with a capacity of 32 million tons are active, 240 plants with a capacity of 8 million tons became inactive. Some sector professionals claim that many local companies would think about a merger or having a foreign partner. Given that Tur- key has geographical proximity to the world’s most flour importing countries like Iraq, Syria, and Afgha- nistan, do you have any investment plan in Turkey? Currently, we are not actively looking for oppor- tunities to invest in Turkey. Is there anything else you’d like to add? At the moment we are in the middle of the cons- truction of our biggest investment in the last years. We are building a 365.000 tons/year capacity mill on the Rhine in the city of Krefeld in Germany. This is a replacement investment for our old mill in Cologne which will be closed down once the new investment is ready in 2020. It is one of the biggest investments in the milling sector in Europe for a long time.