MANILA, Philippines — Gokongwei-led Universal Robina Corp. (URC) is expanding the daily milling capacity in its sugar mill in Kabankalan, Negros Occidental to enhance efficiency and help more farmers improve income.
In a statement, URC president and CEO Irwin Lee said the company’s sugar and renewables subsidiary SONEDCO still has room to grow.
“We talk about how big SONEDCO is and also how big it can be,” he said, noting the goal for now is to further expand the mill’s capacity from 12,000 tons per day to 14,000 tons per day.
“I know it’s a big challenge, but we hope that with all the resources and support URC is giving, SONEDCO will get there,” he said.
URC chairman Lance Gokongwei said the sugar industry “has shown its resilience for many, many decades.”
“We will continue to invest a lot of energy and funds in ensuring that our partner farmers attain the highest productivity and highest income they can generate from their farms. We will likewise ensure that our mills are as efficient and as productive as they can be, while investing in facilities for value-added services, such as sugar refineries, bio-mass energy production, and bioethanol and CO2 production,” he said.
URC acquired SONEDCO–then known as the Southern Negros Development Corp. – from the Montelibano family in 1989. SONEDCO’s core asset then was a sugar mill that could crush 4,000 tons of sugar canes per day.
The plant began expanding in the mid-1990s, doubling its crushing capacity to 8,000 tons of sugar canes per day. It is now processing up to 12,000 tons per day.
The expansion of its refinery stretched SONEDCO’s production to 15,000 bags of refined sugar per day.
SONEDCO also upgraded its sugar mill with state-of-the-art technologies from Japan, Thailand and India to improve efficiency and energy use.
URC Sugar and Renewables (SURE) managing director Renato Cabati said the group’s late founder John Gokongwei Jr. saw the need back then for a sugar mill.
“At the time, we already had a branded foods group. It needed sugar. We were manufacturing candies, ice cream and snacks. Getting into the sugar business would support the branded food businesses, and Mr. John saw that,” he said.
But “Mr. John” had his sights beyond running a sugar mill, as “he had a vision of not only expanding the sugar mill, but also of diversifying the sugar business,” Cabati said.
SONEDCO produces refined sugar used by URC’s branded consumer foods division for its Great Taste coffee, C2, biscuits, candies and other sweetened products. It also supplies bottler’s grade refined sugar to other beverage companies.
Meanwhile, SONEDCO also has a biomass-fired cogeneration plant with a capacity of 46 megawatts (MW) exporting power to the national grid using bagasse, a byproduct of sugar milling, as fuel.