Potential for fiurther growth

With its company Anidis, Versele Laga has a subsid-iary in the Netherlands and Belgium that distributes and markets products of other companies to the pet product trade as well as its own range of goods. The supply spectrum also includes accessory products imported by Versele Laga from the Far East. These are all products with wide appeal, with which pet product stores achieve the majority of their sales in the accessory segment.Now Versele Laga has set up a subsidiary in Poland too, called PLanidis. The Katowice-based firm is responsible for distributing Versele Laga products in the Polish market, and has a 2 000 m² logistics centre for this purpose. The products are delivered by regional wholesalers and also by the company's own vehicles within a 150 km radius of its headquarters. There's also a new Versele Laga subsidiary in Hungary, HUN-anidis, which is based south of Budapest and also boasts a 2 000 m2 warehouse. In autumn 2004 Versele Laga set up a 1 500 m² factory producing winter bird food adjacent to its concentrated feed plant there.It's not just in Eastern Europe that Versele Laga sees good prospects for expanding its market position further in the future. The company is experiencing growth in other regions too. "We're active in an industry in which there are still plenty of possibilities for positive development. The idea of the company failing, as is happening in many sectors, is fortunately not one that features on our agenda," explained marketing director Erik Lambrecht during the festivities marking the 25th anniversary of the company's "Sport & Hobby" department. To mark this anniversary, Versele Laga invited a large number of customers and business partners to Deinze for a huge celebration. In the space of a week, it welcomed nearly 2 000 visitors to three events in all. Running in parallel with the celebrations was a house fair, at which the company presented its full and varied range of pet products to the customers.In the last year the Belg-ian company has notched up € 430 mio in sales, the majority of these deriving from compound feed for working animals. The company's second product segment, pet food, accounted for € 100 mio. 200 people are employed in this segment alone. Growth rates for food for small animals and birds in particular are high.Versele Laga operates six different production plants incorporating state-of-the-art technology:
 A factory in Deinze producing grain and seed mixes for pigeons, ornamental birds and show…