Recently Ukraine "enjoyed" its excellent results in sunoil exports and became the world leader. Crushing plants were mainly involved in seeking the cheapest sunseed, in increasing their capacities, transport problems as well as in competition on sunoil export volumes.

Meanwhile, the accelerated demand for sunflower seeds provoked redistribution of margins from sunoil producers to sunseed producers. Thus, sunseed crushers’ margin decreased to the critical levels or even became negative in some cases in the first half of the 2012/2013 season.

Under these conditions crushing enterprises have to find alternative ways to increase their profitability of sunoil production.

Deep processing of sunoil may become one of the ways to increase the margin. Due to limited domestic market of bottled oils, the production of phosphatide concentrate and/or lecithin looks to be rather promising.

At present, emulsifiers (incl. lecithin) are widely used in food industry, including confectionery, margarine, milk branches. Due to absence of own production, the emulsifiers are imported to Ukraine. The production of phosphatide concentrate – raw material for lecithin production is an additional component in the process of crude sunflower oil output and is negligible.

In case of investments to this new segment of emulsifiers market, lecithin imports may be replaced with its domestic production.

Most likely, the experience of Russia will be of great interest as Russia has come far in this direction by increasing lecithin production capacities in some times. Inflow of investments to lecithin production continues.

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UkrAgroConsult