Seaboard Corp

AMEX:SEB

Seaboard Corp is a diversified food, agriculture, and transportation company. Its biggest business is pork: it raises hogs, processes pork, and sells fresh and packaged pork products to food distributors, retailers, and other large buyers. It also trades and mills grain and other commodities, mainly serving customers in overseas markets that need basic food ingredients and feed products. The company also runs ocean shipping services, moving cargo between the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean, and other international routes. In addition, it has businesses that produce sugar, alcohol, and electricity, which are tied to its industrial operations in the Caribbean. These businesses give Seaboard a mix of farming, processing, logistics, and export activity. Seaboard makes money by selling physical products and services at each step of the chain: pork, grain-based products, shipping capacity, sugar and alcohol, and power. What makes it unusual is that it does not depend on just one simple business. Instead, it sits in several hard-to-replace parts of the food and trade supply chain, where owning production, processing, and transport helps it move goods from farms to customers.