Demand for slower-growing chicken is increasing in many European markets because of animal welfare concerns.Since the release of Unity Forma last month, a wide range of businesses have adopted the product and plan to use it to showcase anything from cars and aircraft to eyewear and hospitality facilities. Wen’s is also looking to France, which has a large retail market for yellow chicken meat, Wen said. Sticking to native breeds means it can also avoid the quarantine issues that curbed the imports of breeding chickens needed for white-feathered broilers last year. He added that another challenge was predicting what the market would want years later. “You may need 10 to 15 years to get somewhere,” said Paul van Boekholt, Hubbard’s marketing director. China’s slower-growing chickens are more expensive to raise than the broilers imported from global genetics firms to supply companies like Yum Brands’ KFC and McDonald’s China.Ĭrossing native males with faster-growing females could help them compete in China, according to experts from France’s Hubbard Breeders, one of the world’s top poultry genetics companies, recently acquired by Aviagen.īut breeding new varieties is an expensive undertaking. Some smaller producers of the native birds, like Hunan Xiangjia Animal Husbandry, already have growing sales in supermarkets and online grocers.īuilding up sales in new markets will take time. Wen’s plan is to develop native chickens that are meatier as well as being tasty. The slower-growing chickens are preferred over white-feathered broilers bred by global companies for their stronger taste in popular dishes like stewed hen soup, as well as their firmer meat and widely assumed superior nutritional merits. Wen’s is China’s leading producer of native breeds, also known as yellow-feathered chickens, which account for about 40 percent of the country’s poultry market, or 4.7 million tonnes last year. “There has always been this cyclical volatility,” she said, adding that the poultry unit would help to “flatten” the risk. First quarter profits were down 4.4 percent to 1.4 billion yuan, and Wen’s shares have lost 15 percent of their value since the start of the year.īut despite a price/earnings ratio that lags smaller, more specialised peers like poultry processor Fujian Sunner or the pig producer Muyuan Foods, Wen’s was big enough to ride out prolonged losses from its pig business, said Chen Lu, analyst at Zhongtai Securities. Net profits in 2017 fell 42.6 percent to 6.8 billion yuan on revenues of 55.7 billion yuan ($8.70 billion).Įarnings are set to fall further this year amid an oversupply of hogs in the market. Wen’s is making the move at a time when its main business, pigs, is suffering from a dramatic slump in prices. If successful, Wen’s could start eating into the sales of companies like Fujian Sunner Development Co that sell broiler chickens bred for their meat efficiency. “You need a certain weight, the body should look good, the taste must suit people’s expectations,” he said, describing the chickens the company was aiming for. That represents a sharp departure from Wen’s roots serving local markets, where the animals are sold alive to customers. Wen’s is drawing on an in-house gene bank and breeding unit to create new varieties of meatier chickens for processing at slaughterhouses to better serve restaurant chains and supermarkets, Wen Pengcheng, a director of the company and its largest shareholder, said in an interview with Reuters. FILE PHOTO: A vendor holds a slaughtered chicken, as chickens are seen on sale, at a market in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, China December 23, 2013.
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