By Business & Finance 
Irish agribusiness, ClonBio, has posted a 143% jump in profit before tax in 2019, increasing from €39m in 2018 to €95m.
The business, founded by Mark Turley, manufactures sustainable bioproducts from grain. It also reported an increase in turnover for the year of 26% to €361m. The company is a large-scale producer of renewable energy and animal nutrition in Europe and invests in biotechnology and the creation of commercially viable bioproducts.
ClonBio’s continuing investment and diversification strategy means that our Group may be a very different business in five years’ time, albeit one that will retain environmental sustainability at its core.
Clonbio is in the second year of a three-year, €150m investment programme. They invested over €65m in 2019, the first phase of the programme. The group’s main asset is a biorefinery, Pannonia Bio, in Hungary. As a result of Covid-19, the demand for ethanol as a biofuel has reduced substantially whereas they have seen an increase in demand for the alcohol constituent in hand sanitisers and other disinfectants.
The biorefinery is now diverting a significant proportion of its ethanol output towards efforts to contain Covid-19. ClonBio has already supplied the market with enough to provide 460 million people with a 100ml bottle of disinfectant.
ClonBio’s founder and executive chairman Mark Turley said: “Beyond Covid-19, ClonBio’s outlook for our increasingly diverse business is positive, and we are currently progressing an investment programme of over €150m across a range of existing and new product areas, most notably in solar and in innovative products and materials that are entirely new to Europe’s markets.”.
“ClonBio’s continuing investment and diversification strategy means that our Group may be a very different business in five years’ time, albeit one that will retain environmental sustainability at its core.”
