Antonio Carrere is the Vice President of Marketing and Sales for Latin America at John Deere. With more than 20 years in the multinational, he spoke about the situation in Argentina after the change of Government at the Agrishow fair, which was recently held in Riverao Preto, Brazil. .
-Why is John Deere’s commitment to Argentina still strong?
-When you work in a global company of this size, you have to make very long-term investments. In other words, we are not looking at short-term trends. We are seeing that the world needs more food, we are more people, at the same time that in Asia, mainly, the economy improves and requires better food. Secondly, it will change the world’s need for renewable energy that helps enable decarbonization. The third trend is that people are migrating to big cities and then there are fewer and fewer people in the countryside who want to work.
With these trends, we are investing very heavily in Latin America, mainly in three geographies: Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, where we have our factories. John Deere invests very heavily in technology and three years ago decided to accelerate its evolution from a machine company to a technology company, focused on data analysis that allows it to be translated into decisions.
-This explains the latest investment in Pla…
-We had a grand opening party for Pla, in Las Rosas, where we expanded the factory and allowed us to continue increasing our support of the complete ecosystem of the production cycle. That is the focus of John Deere: we are the company that today offers the solution for all the operations of a production cycle, both sowing, spraying and harvesting. It was an investment of more than 15 million dollars.
We continue to believe in Argentina as a great producer of food and energy, just as we continue to believe in the Argentine agricultural producer who, despite all the challenges he has faced in recent decades, still continues to invest, still continues to put in and that is why We want to continue investing to support them in a future that we believe will be very good for agriculture.
-You just mentioned that John Deere went from a machinery company to a technology company. How was it achieved?
-John Deere begins to invest in precision agriculture to maximize human potential, that is, if we have fewer and fewer people working in the field but at the same time we want to produce more and in a sustainable way, we need the machine to enhance the capacity. human. So, today that potential comes through the artificial intelligence of computer vision and machine learning. There is the entire John Deere ecosystem, they are John Deere solutions and that is a great differentiation compared to the other brands that seek to partner with different companies.
The nerve center is the Operations Center, where all the information that each machine generates goes through the cloud and is deposited on a phone or a computer, and what is different about John Deere is that later, through the Operations Center , instructions can also be sent to the machine through the cloud.
-How do you see Javier Milei’s government?
-What I mention to all governments is that the countries that achieve more or less success than others are because there is a very aligned public-private policy. It is an extremely aligned work and together, no country has been successful doing only public policies or only private policies. We have to work together. Brazil has done work to support agriculture because it understands that the engine of the Brazilian economy is agriculture, which is why it has state policies that help support the growth of agriculture. In Argentina it has not happened in recent decades, it was the opposite. The generation of taxes generates more negative impact on the producer. So, he has no way to continue reinvesting to improve over time, producing more and more, generating an income benefit: That is why we believe that by working together Argentina can produce much more.
-Did Argentina lose ground in technology compared to competitors, such as Brazil or the United States?
-Within the machines that are marketed in Argentina is all the technology that is in Brazil, the United States or Europe. Now, what is different in Argentina is that we have not had the opportunity to offer our entire portfolio of solutions due to the restrictions. Today, obviously, the scenario changed a lot. We were limited in our solution offering. We had the products that we manufactured in Rosario but we could not import. The portfolio was limited. Today, as the Government eases its import restrictions, we will be able to bring other products with other solutions.
Like many strategies in Latin America, we have to make a hybrid strategy. So, we are going to import because customers are asking us. For example, I was recently in Chaco, where Argentina produces very good cotton, as well as corn, soybeans and sugar cane. We only have one cotton harvester factory globally. So, that factory delivers products to Brazil or in this case to Argentina, which customers were asking us for.
We made a virtual global launch of the largest tractor in the agricultural industry. There are three new models: 710, 770 and 830 horses. Only one global factory will manufacture it, which is in Iowa, United States, and we made the first sale of that tractor in Brazil (during Agrishow). He will go to Argentina when the client wants.
