Barry Callebaut, the Swiss business-to-business chocolate maker, is to buy a majority stake in Malaysian firm KLK Cocoa.
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The company said today (31 March) that it would buy a 60% stake in the business from local conglomerate Kuala Lumpur Kepong.
CEO Patrick De Maeseneire said Barry Callebaut needed to boost its presence in a region where the demand for chocolate is expected to grow rapidly.
“The chocolate market in Asia-Pacific is expected to grow by more than 30% in volume over the next four years,” De Maeseneire said.
“With our rapidly growing chocolate business in Asia, we have an equally growing need for cocoa products. In that regard Asia has been a blank spot on the map for us that we wanted to fill.”
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By GlobalDataThe business in Malaysia will allow Barry Callebaut to more easily source cocoa beans from Indonesia, the world’s third-largest cocoa producer.
KLK Cocoa, which generates annual sales of around MRB500m (US$156m), has a factory west of Kuala Lumpur, which produces 70,000 tonnes of cocoa products a year.
The move is the latest in a string of investments from Barry Callebaut in Asia.
In January, Barry Callebaut opened a chocolate factory in China and sealed a deal to buy production capacity from Japanese confectioner Morinaga.
