Premium ContentMouse over Home then click on Premium Content for information.The president and chief executive of Omaha-based Gavilon, the former commodity-trading arm of ConAgra Foods Inc., said Thursday that if the company is sold, it will maintain a significant presence and employee base in Omaha.
Gavilon's owner, Ospraie Management of New York City, said last week it was exploring a multibillion-dollar sale of the company.
Thursday, Greg Heckman, Gavilon's chief, was asked about a sale during an Association for Corporate Growth meeting at Happy Hollow Country Club.
"As long as I've got something to say about it," he said, "we'll always have a large part of our employee base here."
Since the company is in commodities, an industry Heckman described as one rooted in the relationship between "man and machine," he said the best people to handle those jobs are in Omaha, where there's a solid base of qualified workers.
"People are such a core part of a commodities business," Heckman said. "A lot of those people are really set here, so you can come up with any scenario. ... There will always be a core group in Omaha. I just don't see how we wouldn't always be here."
Gavilon is the 19th-largest privately owned company in the United States and the third-largest grain storage company. It employs 350 people at its Omaha headquarters and 40,000-square-foot trading floor that is leased from ConAgra at its downtown Omaha campus. The company has about 2,000 employees at more than 300 locations, mostly in the United States.
After being divested from ConAgra in 2008, just before the global financial crisis hit, Gavilon has grown its sales and scope significantly.
During the last three years, Heckman and the company's business development team have led 13 completed acquisitions and the construction of 14 significant projects, and established 10 new office spaces, including one in Ukraine, a country that Heckman said will need to raise its agricultural production to help meet future commodity and food demands.
For all of last year, the company distributed 38 million metric tons of grain and ingredients, 6 million tons of fertilizers, as well as 350,000 barrels of crude oil every day.
Being privately owned has allowed Gavilon some of the flexibility to make the growth moves it has since 2008, Heckman said. The company still has to report its finances to investment banks and consult with Ospraie's board on certain big-ticket items, but for the most part Heckman and his management team are free to run their "deal shop" within the company as they wish.
"I love being private," he said. "I don't know if we'll always be private, but I love being private."
Heckman's talk ranged from Gavilon's history, which dates to 1874, when the company was the Peavey Co., to the company's breakup with ConAgra after the trading group became less and less of a core component to the packaged food giant's long-term plans.
And since Gavilon also is involved in energy trading, storage and distribution, Heckman commented on the Keystone XL pipeline scuffle raging in Washington D.C. This month, the U.S. State Department and President Barack Obama formally rejected the pipeline proposal.
"If you've got to reroute it, or whatever, there's got to be a way to do (the project)," said Heckman, who said he was speaking for himself, not Gavilon. "We've got smart people in this country, we should be able to figure out a way to do that."
Contact the writer: 402-444-1414, ross.boettcher@owh.com, twitter.com/rossboettcher
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