Public | |
Traded as | : BG |
Industry | Food processing |
Founded | 1818 |
Founder | Johann P. G. Bunge |
Headquarters | White Plains, New York, United States (operations); Bermuda (legal domicile) |
Area served
|
Worldwide |
Key people
|
Soren Schroder (CEO) |
Products | List of products |
Revenue | US$ 42.679 billion (2016) |
Number of employees
|
32,000 (2017) |
Website | Bunge.com |
Bunge Limited (formerly Bunge International, and prior to that Bunge y Born) is a global agribusiness and food company, incorporated in Bermuda, and headquartered in White Plains, United States. As well as being an international soybean exporter, it is also involved in food processing, grain trading, and fertilizer. It competes with Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland. The company has approximately 32,000 employees in 40 countries.
Bunge y Born was founded in 1818 by Johann Peter Gotlieb Bunge in Amsterdam, it was relocated to Antwerp by Edouard Bounge in 1859. Edouard's brother; Ernest Bunge, took the Bunge name to Argentina in 1884, and in 1905 the business extended to Brazil and later on to the United States. The company was converted into the Bermuda-registered Bunge International in 1994, retaining the Bunge y Born name only in Argentina. Bunge remained a privately held company of 180 shareholders (including the longtime controlling family interests) and divested itself in 1998 of almost all its retail foods interests in favor of a greater role in international agribusiness and commodity markets; by then the company's gross annual turnover had reached US$13 billion. Bunge ultimately went public on the in 2001, becoming Bunge Limited.
In 1994, the Bermuda-registered Bunge International was created as the main company in which the families had shares. There were around 180 shareholders—the main families were Hirsch, Bunge, Born, Engels, and De La Tour. This replaced the older structure in which individual shareholders had stakes in all the different Bunge companies. Now only in Argentina does the Bunge y Born name still exist.