June 16, 2015

Cobb Española's investment gains pace in Spain

With the rising success of the Cobb500 broiler breeder in Spain and North Africa, Cobb Española will be investing a further US$7.2 million in raising production capacity.

Two years ago, the company made a major investment in a hatchery at Dueñas, northern Spain following an earlier purchase of a former Hybro grandparent facilities.  In a US$5.63 million expansion, the hatchery capacity was increased to more than five million parent chicks yearly, thus leading to a doubling of sales in the last six years.

Cobb Española followed this with development of new grandparent farm facilities within 10 kilometres of Dueñas, and has now agreed to hatchery expansion which will take capacity up by another two million chicks yearly towards a target of 10 million.

The rise in sales throughout the marketing area, the Iberian peninsula and North Africa, is particularly strong in Spain and Morocco where the Cobb500 breed is the market leader.

In Algeria, sales have grown from 50,000 to 1.7 million parent stock in five years.

"Customers are achieving consistently high numbers of chicks per breeder, good growth and feed efficiency in the broiler and, importantly, high yield and uniformity at the processing plant," Rafael Gil, the general manager of Cobb Española, commented on the Cobb breed.

"For our part, we have strengthened our technical services team and appointed specialists in areas like nutrition and hatchery science to support our customers. And the continuing growth in our sales across the region gives us confidence to step up our expansion programme."

Rafael currently controls the business from new offices on the northwest outskirts of Madrid, Spain.