The Cooperativa from Cremona, founded in 1900, will be 120 years old on February 5, proud to be one of the few historic food brands that remained Italian and independent, to grow enormously with strong roots in its territory together with its members and to generate a great increase in employment in the beloved land of Lombardy. With 186 stables and about 55,000 cows, it produces more than 10% of Lombardy’s milk, which in turn represents almost 5% of the national milk. In fact, milk production in 2019 almost accounted for 500,000 tons.
Last December 2019 Latteria Soresina, together with its shareholders, carried out a major capitalization operation, bringing its share capital from € 12,179,650 to over € 38,600,000. This operation proved the great responsibility and the ability of the shareholders to think in time to lay new foundations, first and foremost with regard to financial strategy, on markets that change at high speed and require companies to be fast and proactive in interpreting future scenarios in order to be increasingly competitive.
The Chairman Tiziano Fusar Poli explains: “We’re talking about a very big operation. By tripling the company share capital, Latteria Soresina raised the security bar by guaranteeing an extremely competitive future on a global level. Using a marine metaphor, the sails must be arranged and adapted to the size of the boat when in port and in calm seas, because rough seas and storms are part of the route, they arrive sooner or later, and they must be tackled with the utmost safety”.
This decision was also based on an amendment to the articles of association, where the size of the subscription to the capital increase, approved with great foresight by the shareholders, increased from €25 per tonne to €85 per tonne. The further positive and prospective issue is that, for the future, the contribution of this capital will be maintained on the incremental milk, compared to a defined mobile reference. This will make it possible to maintain the financial balance achieved over time. On the other hand, it is quite clear that the increases in milk deliveries are driving Latteria Soresina to invest in the better processing of this additional milk. In fact, the Cooperativa contributions grew continuously from 167 thousand tons in the year 2000 to almost 500 thousand tons today.
The implementation of Latteria Soresina’s financial strategy also provided for the opening of the company itself to an external investor “Fondosviluppo”, a promotion fund of Confcooperative fed by the cooperatives themselves, which subscribed a “hybrid” financial instrument for the value of € 2,500,000, thus entering the company and its assets. This participation is seen as a further positive factor by the stakeholders as it signals transparency and openness towards the outside world of the company from Cremona. In this way, the Cooperativa total assets go from € 33,604,000 to € 62,915,000.
To fully understand the importance of this operation and its future projection, it is essential to remember the numbers of Latteria Soresina. The Cooperarativa from Cremona, chaired by Chairman Tiziano Fusar Poli, has a cheese vault worth about €150 million, with an average stock of about 14 months, and a turnover that in 2019, pending official closures, increased by over €35 million (+9.5%), from €375 million in 2018 to over €410 million. The turnover of Latteria Soresina already increased by about 10 million (+2.7%) between 2017 and 2018. Even better are the export figures, which in 2019 jumped 12.3% to almost € 92 million in turnover.
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