(Bloomberg) — The family behind trading house Sucres et Denrees SA is moving closer to a generational transition by naming Dimitri Varsano as co-head of sugar, the company’s most-traded commodity.
The 28-year-old son of Serge Varsano, who has run the storied French firm for four decades, will lead the division together with Raphael Verley. Both will report to Managing Director Thierry Songeur.
The company, best known in the market as Sucden, has been preparing for succession for years. In 2022, Serge Varsano ceased to be “a person with significant control” at the group’s London brokerage, filings showed, and people familiar with the matter said he’d been transferring shares to his sons.
Dimitri Varsano joined Sucden in 2017 after graduating from the US’s Babson College, and has been part of the sugar trading unit since then.
“Of course there’s an element of preparing for generational change, but it’s very much a natural transition,” Songeur said by phone from the company’s offices in Miami. “It’s not just about a name. Sucden sugar business has done well in the past five or six years.”
Succession is an increasingly pressing issue for several of the world’s major commodity traders, many of which have ownership concentrated in the hands of a few individuals. Gunvor Group last year added the son of founder and majority shareholder Torbjörn Törnqvist to its board.
Agricultural commodity traders, in particular, are unusual in the modern business world, with many of the sector’s biggest players still family-owned. The largest, Cargill Inc., is controlled by the descendants of its founders, while Louis Dreyfus Co. is still held by Margarita Louis-Dreyfus.
Cocoa War
Serge Varsano, 68, took over at Sucden after his father’s death in 1980. He made his name in the so-called Cocoa War later that decade, when top producer Ivory Coast responded to a collapse in prices by imposing an embargo on sales.
After 18 months of stalemate, Varsano convinced then-president Felix Houphouet-Boigny to sell him 400,000 tons of cocoa — half of which would be stored off the market in Amsterdam to prop up prices.
Verley started at Sucden in 1995 and was named head of raw-sugar trading in 2008. Verley and Dimitri Varsano will together run operations in Paris, Dubai, Miami, Brazil, India, Singapore and Shanghai.
Maurice Varsano, Dimitri’s brother, also works for Sucden. As of December 2022, Serge Varsano owned 18.15% of the firm directly, with a further 40.25% held by a family company.
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