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Yara makes and sells the fertilizer that farmers around the world use to grow more food.
Yara is one of the world's biggest fertilizer companies. It takes nitrogen from the air and turns it into the stuff farmers spread on their fields to help crops grow — mainly nitrogen-based fertilizers like urea and nitrate. It also sells phosphate and potash products, plus the smaller nutrients plants need. Farmers buy it because without enough nitrogen, crops simply won't produce as much food, and Yara is one of the few companies with the factories, mines, and shipping network to supply it at global scale.
Here's the basic chemistry that makes the business work. Nitrogen makes up most of the air, but plants can't use it in that form — it's like a sealed food package they can't open. Yara's plants use huge amounts of energy, mostly natural gas, to break the nitrogen molecules apart and combine them with hydrogen to make ammonia, which is the building block for most nitrogen fertilizers. The process is over a century old and extremely energy-hungry, which is why fertilizer prices rise and fall with gas prices. Yara runs big plants in places with cheap energy and sells into more than 150 countries, competing with giants like Nutrien and CF Industries. Its scale in production, logistics, and a global distribution network is what keeps it near the top. The business is cyclical and not always kind. Fertilizer prices spiked in 2022 after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, since Russia is a major exporter of gas and fertilizer ingredients, and then crashed as farmers cut back and new supply came online. Yara's profits swung hard with those prices. Europe's high gas costs have also squeezed its local plants, pushing the company to shift more production toward cheaper-energy regions and to focus on premium products — specialty fertilizers with extra nutrients, and crop-nutrition advice that helps farmers get more from each field. It even runs a small mining arm, extracting phosphate rock and other minerals it feeds into its own products.
In the early 1900s, Europe was struggling to grow enough food, and a Norwegian businessman named Sam Eyde teamed up with a scientist named Kristian Birkeland. Birkeland figured out that you could use the power of falling water to pull nitrogen out of the air — and nitrogen is the key ingredient in fertilizer. Their company, Norsk Hydro, was born from that simple idea: make food grow where it otherwise wouldn't. It was a business built on turning thin air and rivers into bread.
For nearly a century, the fertilizer business lived inside Norsk Hydro, one part of a much bigger industrial company. Then, in 2004, it was cut loose and listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange as Yara International — a stand-alone company focused purely on crop nutrition and industrial nitrogen. The idea was simple: let the fertilizer people run the fertilizer business, without competing for attention with oil and aluminum.
Then the floor fell out. During the 2008 financial crisis, Yara's share price collapsed from over fifty euros to barely above ten, wiping out more than twelve billion euros of market value in a matter of weeks. With demand weak, the company had to cut ammonia and urea production at some of its plants. It was a brutal reminder that even a company selling something the world always needs is not safe from a panic.
In 2015, Svein Tore Holsether took over as CEO — and he walked into a company in the middle of spending heavily on projects across Europe, Africa, Australia and Latin America. His job was to make all that investment pay off. The company had grown wide; now it needed to grow well.
Yara kept pushing into the places where food matters most. It bought Tata Chemicals' urea plant and distribution business in India, gaining a real foothold in one of the world's biggest fertilizer markets. It also poured roughly 275 million dollars into its Rio Grande plant in Brazil, betting that South American farms would keep needing more crop nutrition.
In 2018, Yara put its mission into one clean line: 'Responsibly feed the world and protect the planet.' That was more than a slogan — it set the company's priorities around running its plants better, selling solutions that scale, and finding new ways to grow. The fertilizer giant was starting to think about its footprint, not just its output.
Ammonia is the backbone of fertilizer, but making it the traditional way spews a lot of carbon. So Yara spun out Yara Clean Ammonia as a separate unit in 2021, with a clear goal: speed up the shift to low-emission ammonia. The bet was that the same molecule that feeds crops could one day help cut emissions elsewhere — in shipping, in industry, in power.
A few years later, Yara christened the Yara Birkeland, the world's first autonomous, electric container ship. It's a floating symbol of the same idea: move goods without the diesel. The little vessel alone removes forty thousand truck journeys from the roads every year. Fertilizer, it turns out, can travel quietly and cleanly too.
In 2025, Yara's Sluiskil plant in the Netherlands switched on Europe's largest carbon capture project. It captures up to 800,000 tons of CO2 a year, turns it into liquid, and ships it to be locked away beneath the Norwegian seabed. It's the clearest example yet of Yara's new pitch: keep making the fertilizer the world needs, but stop the carbon from reaching the sky.
At its Capital Markets Day in early 2026, Yara laid out its next act: a fresh improvement program aimed at squeezing out extra earnings — around 200 million dollars by 2027, and another 150 million by 2030. It is still working with Air Products on big ammonia projects, with a final investment decision expected around mid-2026. And the business is delivering: strong 2025 results, with 709 million dollars of EBITDA in the fourth quarter alone, and a proposed annual dividend of 22 Norwegian kroner per share. A company born to fight famine is now trying to feed the world without heating it.
On the green side, Yara is pushing into low-carbon ammonia, made with renewable power or with captured carbon, for farm use and as a cleaner shipping fuel. It's a real bet but still small next to the core fertilizer business. The company consistently puts cash back to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks — it's one of the Oslo exchange's biggest names — while also investing in its plants. The simple truth: Yara feeds the world's farms, it earns a good living when fertilizer prices are high, and it manages a bumpy ride when they're not.
Saved answer · last researched 7 Nov 2026
The world's biggest fertilizer market is split into small pieces: Yara holds 7.6% of it
Yara sells more mineral fertilizer than almost anyone, yet it collects only 7.6% of the money spent on fertilizer worldwide. Farming is huge and spread across many suppliers, so no single company controls it. That small slice is why Yara's profits swing with gas prices and why it pushes specialty products where it can charge more. Source: Global Market Insights, data from 2025