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Bumitama Agri Ltd.
Bumitama Agri grows oil palms in Indonesia and sells the crude palm oil and palm kernels they produce to buyers around the world.
Bumitama Agri is a palm oil producer. It owns and runs oil palm plantations in Indonesia, mostly in Kalimantan and Sumatra, and it turns the fruit from those trees into two things the world buys in huge volumes: crude palm oil and palm kernel. Crude palm oil goes into cooking oil, snacks, soap, shampoo, and biodiesel. Palm kernel is the seed inside the fruit, and it gets crushed for oil used in cosmetics and food, with the leftover meal fed to animals.
The business starts in the field. Oil palms take about three to four years to bear fruit, then keep producing for roughly 25 years. Workers harvest heavy bunches of fruit, which must reach a mill quickly before the oil starts to spoil. Bumitama runs its own mills near its estates to squeeze the oil out and prepare it for shipment. This makes it an integrated grower: it controls the trees, the mills, and the selling, rather than just buying fruit from others. Palm oil is one of the most efficient crops on earth per hectare, which is why it is everywhere in groceries and why demand keeps growing. But that efficiency has a dark side. Expanding plantations has driven deforestation in Southeast Asia, and buyers in Europe and elsewhere increasingly demand proof that the oil was grown without clearing protected forests or peatlands. Bumitama has faced scrutiny over land and sustainability issues in the past and has worked to certify more of its estates and tighten its practices, because losing access to picky customers is a real risk.
Palm oil prices swing widely with global vegetable oil markets, so Bumitama's profits rise and fall with them even when its harvest is steady. It competes with other big Indonesian and Malaysian growers such as Wilmar International and Golden Agri-Resources. Investors mostly own it for the dividend, since a mature plantation business generates plenty of cash and does not need to keep plowing it back into new land.
Saved answer · last researched 12 Nov 2026