Universal Robina Corp. (URC) eyes to expand further the capacity of SONEDCO, its sugar mill in Kabankalan, Negros Occidental from 12,000 tons to 14,000 tons per day.
Irwin Lee, URC president and chief executive officer, said there is still room to grow the facility which has seen robust expansion the past 35 years.
URC chairman Lance Gokongwei said the sugar industry overall “has shown its resilience for many, many decades.”
“We will continue to invest a lot of energy and funds in ensuring that our partner farmers attain the highest productivity and highest income they can generate from their farms. We will likewise ensure that our mills are as efficient and as productive as they can be, while investing in facilities for value-added services, such as sugar refineries, bio-mass energy production, and bio-ethanol and CO2 production,” Gokongwei said.
From being just a source of a vital food product, SONEDCO has become an ecosystem, a community of farmers, people, business and technology, said Renato Cabati, managing director of URC Sugar and Renewables (SURE).
URC acquired SONEDCO — then known as the Southern Negros Development Corp. – from the Montelibano family in 1989. SONEDCO’s core asset then was a sugar mill that could crush 4,000 tons of sugar canes per day.
SONEDCO began expanding in the mid-1990s, bringing its capacity from crushing 4,000 to 8,000 tons of sugar canes per day. Over the years, it has further raised that capacity and is currently processing up to 12,000 tons per day.
The expansion of its refinery stretched SONEDCO’s production to 15,000 bags of refined sugar per day.
SONEDCO also upgraded its sugar mill with state-of-the-art technologies from Japan, Thailand and India to improve efficiency and energy use.
The mil also produces its own electricity. It built a biomass-fired cogeneration plant that now provides 19 megawatts to the national grid using bagasse, a byproduct of sugar milling, as fuel.
