EBITDA + 20% and ILSA replicates herself in Brazil

With an EBITDA that increased by 20% in the last financial statements, Ilsa confirms its good financial health. This has also been certified by the Credit Data Search, which recently reconfirmed its A+ score to demonstrate our high credit rating. This has facilitated new productive investments in converting the large area behind the Arzignano industrial premises to a greenhouse for the cultivation of medicinal herbs used in the creation of plant nutrition and crop health-related products. The plants are treated with ultramodern technologies that are available to the company, such as enzymatic hydrolysis combined with supercritical CO₂ extraction to keep the molecules stable and pure.

The company uses these extracts with innovative technical means for highly sustainable agriculture. This is a project that Ilsa planned for many years, which was previously blocked by authorizations that did not arrive, in order to implement a virtuous cycle of internal production of raw materials for the creation of its biostimulants. The company aims to inaugurate the experimental greenhouse by the end of 2019. In the meantime, work has begun on the construction of new, fully automated and robotised packaging lines. At the end of the work, the total investment will exceed 3 million euros and the number of people employed will grow by more than 10%, including the recruitment of at least eight new, qualified employees.

Overseas in the Porto Alegre plant in Brazil, launched in 2008, Ilsa has "cloned" herself. Thanks to a new pelleting plant and the legal registration of many company products, including those used for organic farming, Ilsa today aims to arrive with renewed strength to South American markets, with particular interest in the huge agricultural areas of Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Colombia, Peru, and Chile. In Chile, Ilsa has commercial offices that employ highly-qualified agronomists. The production capacity of the new Brazilian plant will be 20,000 tons per year and employment in the new carioca plant will reach 20 that will add to the 34 already occupied. The relations between Arzignano and Porto Alegre will also be denser because, by March 2019, Ilsa will use part of the new Brazilian production to supply some Central American and Asian markets.

The entry of the Biolchim Group into the Ilsa financial structure has not only led to the creation of the most important global group in the biostimulants sector, which in 2017 consolidated a turnover of 114 million euros, but allowed the Vicenza company to accelerate its growth. "We were already working in 49 countries”, underlines Paolo Girelli, president of Ilsa. “Today, the group allows us to sell our fertilizers in more than 80 countries and we are registering our specialties for agriculture in 11 new countries spread over the five continents". "All of this requires us to increase our production capacity and investment in research, which will remain focused on the Arzignano site, destined to become more and more the strategic heart of the group" concludes Girelli.