World’s 40 Leading Pig Producers, 40 Pork Processors Ranked

BY BRUCE PLANTZ

　　Pig International is introducing its exclusive listing of the largest 40 pig producers and 40 pig pro-cessors worldwide.

　　Three years ago, WATT Global Media started collecting information on the world’s leading pig producers and pork processors. In 2014 and 2015, we published short lists of leading companies. The data has been improved and expanded over the past two years with more analysis in the magazine focused on these two categories.

　　See the full World’s Leading Pig Producers and Pork Processors database on WATTAgNet.com for more information.

　　Creating a worldwide top companies list has its challenges. One of which is to give a repre-sentation of the world pork market that is not dominated by the two leading producing countries. We limited the companies from those countries to the top six U.S. pro-ducers and the top nine Chinese pig processors.

　　For the top pig processors list, we used the number of head slaughtered annually as the mea-surement to rank the companies. For top producers, we used the number of sows under their con-trol or contract.

　　This gave us top 40 lists that include pig producers and proces-sors from North America, South America, Europe and Asia.

　　Reporting on multinational conglomerates, many of whom dominate the top of the lists, is another challenge. We have tried to report total production of the entire group, and have not broken out the subsidiaries.

　　In order to keep the informa-tion current, we try to report

　　on the current structure of the company, but use the past year’s production numbers. So, for a company such as JBS, we are describing the recent acquisitions and restructuring of the company, but using 2015 fi gures to piece to-gether production numbers of the entire group.

　　The online database will give you access to full information on the countries listed here, plus information on additional compa-nies from around the world. It can be accessed at http://www.wattag-net.com

　　Finally, we know these lists are not perfect, and we welcome criti-cism, corrections or comments. They can be directed to bplantz@ wattglobal.com.