Purpose

CIS, or the International Seed Company (Compañia Internacional de Semillas, in Spanish), was founded in 1986. Its partners are The Royal VanDerHave Group, a former Dutch sugar beet seed company, and the Lecaros Menéndez family. The initial objective was to serve IANSA but later it expanded its business to the entire seed market for the local or export market, mainly corn, sunflower and sugar beet seeds.

The company began to locally produce 59 hectares of multigerm sugar beet for the domestic market and exportation, and 60 hectares of maize for its Dutch partners. During the same season, they began to try Dutch maize varieties for the south of the country, SPS Argentina sunflower seeds, Dutch wheat, VanDerHave gramineae and hybrid onions.

The company places 70 tons of multighermic beet seed with IANSA. This year the first corn drying equipment is imported from Holland and the first North American corn trials.

In this year a plot in Paine was purchased, where there current processing plant is being built. The company continued increasingly testing and producing sugar beet and maize, in the search for additional crops. That year, the first monogerm seed imported from VanDerHave Holland was sold to IANSA, and maize was produced for the first time for Cooperative de Pau, from southern France.

First operations in the process plant. The society created the Nursery department to meet the needs of VanDerHave. The first crops worked were corn, beet, beet, rapeseed, sunflower and beans. That year, the company invested US$420,000 to build and equip the processing plant.

This year, the company hires a Production Manager to properly attend to the increase in its activity. The company reports having increased sales threefold in the last four years. That season, the company was involved in the production of lettuce, cauliflower, hybrid tomato, onion, beans and other seeds.

Board meeting in Holland. This year, the company achieves sales of US $ 5,840,000. It exports mainly to the US and begins its relationship with Corn State. With which it established a long and prosperous business relationship.

New CIS logo that starts to be used after the change of properties from Ses VanDerHave to Advanta. VanDerHave merges with AstraZeneca Seeds, forming Advanta Seeds based in the Netherlands. The company’s property to that date was shared equally between Laserco (ex Duncan Fox) and Advanta.

Our main customer, Corn States, became part of the Monsanto group, for who we produced maize, sunflower and canola. This year, the company began to produce for clients in Pakistan, France and Spain. The maize business grew strongly as well as sales in the local market, with fodder and alfalfa seeds, which achieved their highest levels since the company’s inception.

GMO production had gained importance with the consequent difficulties in complying with genetic purity, mainly for European corn yields. Chile started to become an expensive producer due to
the low yields of transgenic products.

Our partner, Advanta, had been dismantled and sold for parts to various competing companies. This brought about times of instability and unrest to our team, and CIS had to adapt to the new scenario. Laserco bought Advanta’s shares, leaving the company in the hands of Chilean shareholders.

The introduction of Monsanto’s winter raps materials was a success and became one of the main businesses of the company in the local market.

The Sahli Lecaros family, shareholders of Laserco, took control of the company through Inversiones Nueve Chelines, keeping CIS’ characteristic of being a family business.

This year, due to excellent relationships, CIS started producing counter-season soybean seeds for Corn States and then Monsanto. This production and ensuring certain minimum volumes allowed CIS to invest in the processing plant allowed it to be the largest producer of soybeans in Chile.

This year, CIS closed a deal to become the exclusive distributor of maize of prestigious French company RAGT.

CIS begins the commercialization of cereals, forage sorghum and fertilizers.

CIS celebrates 35 successful years of life in the national seed industry at the service of farmers and their customers. This same year the commercialization of sweet corn begins.

Due to the experience and specialized technical team, CIS was nominated by Bayer® as the exclusive representative of the Dekalb® brand in Chile and began the distribution of corn throughout the country.