Raízen completes integration with Biosev, incorporates 10 thousand employees and nine units in less than a year

Raízen, a biofuels company and the largest producer of sugar and ethanol in Brazil, completed the Biosev integration process this month. With the purchase agreement, which took place in August 2021, the company boosted its business, raising the level of the sugar-energy sector, in addition, it strengthened and expanded its unique and integrated business model.

The combination with Biosev's assets was a strategic move for Raízen, which managed to promote efficiency and operational synergies, enhancing opportunities in biorefineries with advanced technology and in line with ESG market demands. The great challenge for the company was to incorporate, in less than nine months, around 10 thousand employees who worked in the operation of Biosev's nine plants, five in the State of São Paulo, three in Mato Grosso do Sul and one in Minas Gerais.

Together, the new units have energy cogeneration and export capacity of 1.316 GWh of electrical energy. With their arrival, Raízen now has 35 bioenergy parks, which total a total installed capacity of up to 105 million tons of sugarcane in around 1.3 million hectares of cultivated area.

“The acquisition of Biosev consolidated Raízen as an integrated energy company and strategic partner in offering complete solutions to its customers, valuing quality and sustainability throughout its business chain. The units that came from Biosev are located in strategic regions and, therefore, favor the competitive expansion of Raízen's business and allowed the expansion of over 280 thousand hectares of planted area”, explains Francis Queen, executive vice-president of Raízen.

From now on, the Biosev brand ceases to exist and all units will display the Raízen visual identity. “It is important to highlight that Biosev’s assets represent numerous economies of scale for Raízen. In addition to an opportunity to expand sustainable agriculture, which prioritizes good agricultural practices, we are adopting the best practices of each of the companies and, with this synergy, it was possible to optimize operational, management and capital costs in all our processes” , points out Queen.

In order for the integration to be carried out in this short space of time, Raízen created a working group of approximately 200 people, which began to work directly in the process of reviewing the structures, thus allowing us to take advantage of the best of each of the companies. During this period, it carried out more than 270 training sessions focused on new processes and systems. To understand the complexity of some of these processes, it is worth highlighting that 8.000 hours of training were dedicated to the operations team alone with the implementation of a new service permission governance program, which allowed the standardization of processes and, consequently, the reduction of accidents.

“Raízen is the result of a joint venture between Shell and Cosan. Therefore, obviously, based on our own expertise, the entire integration process was well structured. So, we planned a complete process, with major communication challenges to assist in this change management. After all, we needed to extract the best practices from both parties, because all of this would impact the lives of everyone in this new company. Not only the 10 thousand employees who were arriving from Biosev, but also the more than 30 thousand people from Raízen”, points out Queen.

Future vision

Committed to the ESG agenda, Raízen has an extremely robust expansion plan, which values ​​sustainable sources as a possible response to a global need for effective changes in the sector, as a way to mitigate the impacts caused by climate change. This effort includes continued investment in biofuels, bioelectricity and bioproducts -- with emphasis on biogas and second generation ethanol (E2G), which are two of the company's biggest bets for the future.

“This means that, to put everything we are planning into practice, we will need our entire team. It also means that this is a company of opportunities, because we are very optimistic about the sector and everything we are going to build. But to overcome this challenge, we will need an integrated team. It's not one or the other, it's one plus the other. We're going to need everyone. We can't give up on anyone. That is why completing this integration process successfully and so quickly is very important for us”, highlights the vice-president of Raízen.