The peat extraction and processing company SIA Silu Kudra has received a loan of EUR 300,000 from the Citadele Bank to support the company's development. Next month, the company will be opening a peat substratum manufacturing line meant for the needs of small gardening operations.
"Partnerships with export companies and support for their manufacturing activities are leading priorities for the Citadele Bank, and we can see regional businesspeople becoming more and more active in terms of reorganising and developing their operations and receiving financing for those goals," says the director of the Citadele Bank's Western region, Baiba Freināte. "We launched our partnership with SIA Silu Kudra in the Smārde Parish because we very much appreciated what the company had done in the specific sector in which it not only has experience and a stable output of products, of which 98% are sold abroad, as well as the company's convincing business plan for the future. We are also glad to support a company that is an important employer and taxpayer in its region."
"We have offered approximately 60 types of peat substrata for the needs of professionals -- large greenhouses, tree farms, and so on, and we will be opening our fourth manufacturing line to offer gardeners and people with indoor plants the very important peat substratum in smaller package -- 20 to 80 litres," says SIA Silu Kudra board member Andris Ritenis. "We are currently installing equipment for the new manufacturing line, and this expansion will allow us to offer three or four new jobs to local residents."
SIA Silu Kudra is part of a German joint venture, and that has ensured an export market in that country, as well as in other countries. "Our 250-litre bags and 5.5 cubic metre packages of peat substrata meant for professionals are appreciated in Turkey and Tunisia," says Ritenis. "Those countries have comparatively large markets, because they cannot find natural soil or a substratum that is as valuable as ours. Gardeners there have at least four harvests of tomatoes and flowers each year. We deliver our products via container ships, and other destinations include France, Hungary, China and even South America. We sell very little of our output in Latvia, but now that we are offering smaller packages of substrata, we may find greater demand in the local market and in other, nearby countries. For instance, we recently begun negotiations with several companies in Poland."
SIA Silu Kudra has been manufacturing substrata since 2007 and has been extracting peat since 2011. The company offers 18 different kinds of mixtures, most of them coming from sieved fractions of peat. The company buys all of its peat from owners of Latvian peat swamps, though it also owns a field of peat that is 100 hectares in size. The company uses fractions of peat that are cut up to produce substrata, as well as fractions of milled peat and black peat. Other additives are bought from Latvian and foreign producers. Depending on the order, the company mixes up various fractions of peat, adding the necessary amounts of calcium, NPK, microelements, perlite and clay. Calcium comes from Latvian companies, while the other elements are imported from Germany."