Today I can give you another perspective of RICA from Sal D'Acunto, the trader at M. H. Meyerson, who has been trading this stock for years before the Pipasa deal.
Last Monday I told you I had put in a call to a trader who I believed was supporting RICA, but he was going to be away from his office a few days. Well, late yesterday he returned my call and gave me his take on RICA.
Sal and Marty Meyerson recently traveled to Costa Rica to check out RICA. Sal was very impressed because he saw motivated workers working very hard in ultramodern facilities wearing hats, face masks, boots that had to be scrubbed with soap before entering the clean room, and in short, nothing to indicate any "third world" type of environment. It was in every way comparable to what you would expect at Tyson.
We discussed the USDA approval and surprisingly, Sal didn't think shipping chicken itself to the USA was really that big a deal because of the transportation costs. He thinks the real explosive growth is still with the peripheral countries of Central and South America. The RICA video said RICA ships to Argentina, but the cost structures of Argentina and the US could be entirely different. He said the USDA approval was still very important but the real niche in the US that RICA could create is in its peripheral products such as pate' and sausage. Sal asked me if I was familiar with certain Italian food products which I didn't recognize, but he said he had a lunch there of products made of poultry that was absolutely delicious. He actually ate too much pate' because it was so good. He doesn't think the US has some of these products and it sounds like that could be a high margin business for the deli sections of our super markets as well as the bodegas. All I think it would take is some advertising and marketing.
Sal traveled around Costa Rica and saw Pipasa advertised all over, just like Coca Cola is advertised, as I've said before. He saw bus shelters built by Pipasa so that Pipasa could advertise on them. I rode a bus to work for 11 years and if I knew it was going to rain, I'd drive. Well, if I didn't have a car, I'd think kindly of a company that kept me dry as I traveled. I hardly think RICA will build bus shelters in the US, but you never know. I saw a lot of people waiting for buses in the Miami area, and tropical storms can dump a lot of water on you in a big hurry.
Pipasa's business is not exclusively chicken and includes turkey, cornish hens, and other poultry. They even supply Chicken McNuggets to the Central American McDonalds chain. |
