Athens Conference Aims to Increase Global Market Share for Greek Oils

The olive oil sci­en­tific soci­ety FILAIOS will be host­ing a con­fer­ence with sub­ject ​“Financial Tools, Investment Possibilities and Promotional Opportunities in the Olive Sector” at the Athens Chamber of Commerce and Industry, at 5:00 PM tomor­row (November 16^th, 2017).

Along with another meet­ing on olive oil in the food­ser­vice indus­try, the events are being con­ducted as part of the ​“Olive Oil Day” cel­e­bra­tions.

The top­ics to be pre­sented at the con­fer­ence are:

• Financial tools for devel­op­ment ini­tia­tives, by exec­u­tives from the Banking sec­tor
• Investment Opportunities to Improve Infrastructure, by Panagiotis Karantonis, deputy direc­tor of SEVITEL and board mem­ber of FILAIOS
• Promotional Opportunities and Extroversion, by George Oikonomou, direc­tor of SEVITEL and board mem­ber of FILAIOS
• Exhibitions, a Marketing Tool for Olive Products, by Nikos Choudalakis, CEO of FORUM AE

Panagiotis Karantonis, the deputy direc­tor of SEVITEL made the fol­low­ing state­ment on the need to improve the posi­tion­ing of Greek olive oils in the global mar­ket:

“We are a coun­try with a sur­plus in olive oil pro­duc­tion. We pro­duce 50 per­cent more than our inter­nal needs every year, there­fore it must find a way out to other coun­tries.

Until now, this way was found by in-bulk exports to Italy, but this is an unsta­ble bal­ance of the mar­ket, firstly, because this way Italians con­trol the Greek mar­ket and the prices of the pro­duc­ers and sec­ond, new mar­kets are grad­u­ally devel­oped from which they can sup­ply bulk olive oil.

For exam­ple, Spain and Tunisia are two com­pet­i­tive coun­tries for Greece, at least in vol­umes, with large pro­duc­tion abil­i­ties, espe­cially Spain which is the largest olive oil pro­ducer glob­ally with 2 mil­lion tons per year and Tunisia with sig­nif­i­cant invest­ments in the olives and olive oil sec­tor. Both of them have an advan­tage against Greece in pro­duc­tion costs.

To face this dis­ad­van­tage, we must improve and pro­mote our qual­ity, in order to obtain a larger mar­ket share in the global mar­ket for the stan­dard­ized prod­uct.

Considering the coun­tries that do not pro­duce but only con­sume olive oil, like the north­ern European coun­tries, Canada, Japan, Russia and coun­tries that pro­duce less than they con­sume, there­fore they import olive oil like the USA, these mar­kets are esti­mated to be con­sum­ing more than 700,000 tons of stan­dard­ized olive oil annu­ally.

In this mar­ket, we are claim­ing a share that, if it reaches 10 to 15 per­cent, we will add up to 100,000 tons of stan­dard­ized olive oil per year. Then, the depen­dence from the Italian mar­ket and con­di­tions in the global olive oil pro­duc­tion will enable us to invest in a safer future.

If we don’t improve our global mar­ket share, we will have to face huge sur­plus dur­ing peri­ods of large pro­duc­tions in Spain and Tunisia that will nail our prices, like we saw over the last years when the price for extra vir­gin olive oil dropped below €2, because of Spain’s large pro­duc­tion that reached 1.8 mil­lion tons. For Greece, qual­ity is the safety net we can pro­vide for the future of the prod­uct.”

More details about the sched­ule of the con­fer­ence can be found here.

• FILAIOS