What do Japanese lentils, organic Italian rice, Moroccan green beans and Finnish maize (corn) all have in common? Well there’s a chance that each crop was sown with an Irish-made planter, or more specifically a Samco System developed and manufactured in, and exported from, Adare in Co Limerick.

Samco is one of those typical success stories of Irish agribusiness. It’s a company that has quietly operated below the radar for years yet built itself into a global exporter with sales markets all over the world.

Owned by the Shine family, Samco is best known for its three-in-one machines that sow seeds, spray the soil with pre-emergence herbicides and finally lay a thin layer of degradable film over the seed bed. The company also manufactures a range of other tillage and grass equipment.

Today, over 80% of Samco’s sales are generated from export markets such as France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, Sweden, Finland, Poland, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Morocco, China, Japan, New Zealand, Chile, Canada and the US.

What Samco best encapsulates is the Triple-A business principle: agility, adaptability and alignment. The company is agile to its customers’ needs, it can adapt its system to fit a whole range of crops and planting rates, and it is aligned with its customers need to be more efficient.

Speaking to the Irish Farmers Journal, Samco managing director Robert Shine says that every new customer will want something different.

“There’s lots of different needs and variations out there. Some customers who are using our new punch hole planter want one seed per hole when planting, while others will want 10 seeds per hole. Other customers will want 9in row facings, while some want 30in row facings,” explains Shine.

Reputation

“But Samco has built up a bit of a reputation as a company that can meet customers’ needs. We have a base model for our machines where we have 50% of the parts on the shelf. When a new customer comes along, we may have to design and manufacture the other 50% of the machine from scratch,” he adds.

Being this agile to react to customer needs takes investment. In the last year, Samco completed a €1.5m investment in a new facility at its Adare site for a plastics extruder machine, which allows the company to manufacture degradable film in Ireland for the first time. For the past 15 years, Samco’s partner company in China has manufactured the film.

However, the real win for the company comes further down the line with the repeat business its machines will generate.

“When we look at a new market or customer, we have to view it as a long-term project rather than short-term. The market only becomes successful for us when we get that repeat business for the degradable film,” says Shine.

“A new market requires development in the first two years. It’s only in the third year when we start recouping some of the investment we’ve made,” he adds.

It may come as a surprise, but the bulk of Samco’s business relates to the sale of degradable film rather than the actual machines it manufactures.

“Over 80% of our turnover comes from film sales. The machine is only 20% of the business today because we need to make more and more film every year to supply all the Samco machines out there,” explains Shine.

“Our machines will last up to 15 years but the farmer will always need film each year to sow the crop. Every year if we can make 50 to 60 new machines for customers those machines will have to be serviced with film every year.”

Investment

In a given year, Samco will typically spend 5% of turnover on R&D work, which is all carried out in-house. Yet the company is seeing a return on this investment.

“Producing film for maize crops is still probably 75% to 80% of our business,” says Shine. “But in the last four to five years we’re doing a lot more business with farmers planting very different types of crops and we can bring a lot of innovation.”

The variety of crops ranges from sweet corn and beans to sunflowers in northern France, vegetables in Japan and cannabis/hemp in the US and Canada.

It says much about the global reach of Samco that the UK market accounts for less than 20% of the company’s turnover today. Without the same Brexit headaches as many other agribusinesses, Samco can continue to innovate and win business with new farmer customers and new crops all around the world.