Pran - Agricultural Marketing Co. Ltd.

Introduction:

1 History of Pran

PRAN is the brand name of Agricultural Marketing Co. Ltd. (AMCL). It was launched in 1983 as an agricultural business. The company was established to serve diverse purposes like serving small farmers with inputs, marketing farm products, organizing contract growers to grow specific crops and exporting of agricultural products. PRAN stands for 11 "Program for Rural Advancement Nationally". The Mission of the company is to generate employment opportunity and to earn dignity and self-respect for their compatriots. The objective of the company is to achieve social values with sustainable pecuniary advantage.

The company is very much vertically integrated that starts from the mango cultivation up to the finished products in different forms. The company makes available farm inputs at the farmer's doorstep. They go for cultivation and processing of hybrid tomato, baby corn and mango through contract farmers on commercial scale. PRAN has latest technology that can produce pineapple round the year. PRAN also introduced tissue culturing, cultivation, processing, canning and dehydration of the mushrooms on commercial basis. In the factory it has food processing plant and pulping plant, which supply the

Ingredients for the main plant.

Unlike other companies who are importing raw materials from other countries, PRAN is basically trying to help the farmer community of Bangladesh. Country can be proud to have PRAN because it is made from our mango and sugar.

AMCL set up its bottling and canning factory on 8 acres of land in May 1991. Over the years the factory has expanded substantially in all spheres of food processing such bottling, canning, pulping, pickling, concentrating, dehydrating as well as installation of Bangladesh's first tetra pack facility for juices and modem extrusion plant for snack food. Machinery for all these lines are being installed, expanded, modified and fabricated continuously.

PRAN became very successful competing with strong multinational companies like Coke, Pepsi, and big companies from different parts of the world from very beginning. It has a strong distribution channel, which helped the company to become successful in the beverage industry. One other important factor that is needed to sustain in this business is to have a very strong market. Though Bangladesh is a highly populated country with 120 million people, there are very few people who can afford to have a quality product like PRAN. If market grows and over all macroeconomic condition improves then companies like PRAN can sell high volumes. For the development of beverage industry three things are needed. One is company like PRAN should come with quality products, good distribution network and important thing is increasing the income level of people to afford quality products.

2 Subsidiary Enterprises

PRAN Group is one of the fastest growing corporate houses in the country. It has got quit good number of subsidiary enterprises, which includes:

* Property Development Ltd. (PDL): This is the oldest enterprise of PRAN Group. The Group was established on the profit