Atopco Beef

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New Hope Group (NH Group) is the biggest agribusiness company in China providing “farm to fork” agriculture food products mainly for China market. New Hope Agriculture and Food Fund II, L.P. (“NH Fund”) is mainly sponsored by New Hope Group for investing growth capital in emerging agribusiness companies across China and beyond. Both NH Group and NH Fund are IFC’s existing clients. Atopco is a holding company (‘”the company”) created as a beef value chain company by NH Group and NH Fund to produce processed beef products such as ready-to-cook and ready-to-eat products tailored to Chinese market. Atopco currently has one slaughtering house, Kilcoy Pastoral Company (“KPC”), in Brisbane Queensland Australia and is building a further meat processing facility in Fujian Province China through a joint venture with a local restaurant chain. Over time, Atopco aims to hold two more slaughter houses in Australia and Uruguay through acquiring existing operations and develop another two meat processing facilities in Shanghai and Beijing or Tianjin with an estimated total capacity of meat processing in China 30,000 ton/year.The proposed investment, up to US$15 million in the form of straight equity and US$20 million in the form of straight loan, is to inject into Atopco, exclusively used to establish the meat processing facilities in China (“the project”), which is expected to be the extension of slaughtering operations in Australia and Uruguay with primary activities to be further cutting, marinating and pre-market packaging of precut prime-cut beef supplied from the slaughtering houses.