en.Wedoany.com Reported - Usina Pitangueiras, a Brazilian sugar mill, ended the 2025/26 harvest season with its second-highest net profit in history and plans to invest approximately 1 billion reais (about 1.25 billion yuan) over the next few years to build a corn ethanol plant, biomethane production facilities, a carbon dioxide capture unit, and a cattle fattening project, aiming to expand industrial capacity and diversify revenue sources.
Company President João Henrique de Andrade stated that the performance in the 2025/26 harvest season was mainly driven by the commercial strategy adopted at the beginning of the season. At that time, the company seized opportunities from rising sugar and energy prices and conducted hedging operations at favorable levels. The mill crushed 2.818 million tons of sugarcane in the 2025/26 season and ended the fiscal year with one of the best financial performances in its history.
Andrade noted that the company's best financial performance was still achieved after completing the cogeneration expansion in 2019, an investment that significantly increased the share of electricity sales in the company's revenue. In addition to the commercial strategy, improvements in agricultural efficiency also helped reduce costs. Currently, approximately 24,000 hectares of land receive applications of vinasse and other nutrients, reducing reliance on mineral fertilizers and leading to continuous efficiency gains over recent harvest seasons.
For the 2026/27 harvest season, Usina Pitangueiras plans to crush 3.8 to 3.9 million tons of sugarcane, an increase of about 1.1 million tons from the previous season. However, Andrade assessed that current sugar prices remain below production costs, ethanol market margins are very low, and the decline in the reference price for the electricity market—the Settlement Price for Differences (PLD)—will also reduce the profitability of electricity sales from the plant.
As part of its diversification strategy, building an ethanol plant with an annual processing capacity of approximately 400,000 tons of corn is one of the company's main alternatives for sustained growth. Andrade explained that this move is to address the limitations on sugarcane area expansion in the region where the mill is located, potentially increasing the company's equivalent capacity from about 4 million tons to around 6 million tons. Meanwhile, the biomethane project is gaining further momentum. This plan envisions integration with a carbon dioxide capture plant and a cattle feedlot, where animal waste can increase biogas production and improve the economic viability of the biomethane plant. These investments create synergies with each other and, when combined, may exceed 1 billion reais, solidifying the company's strategy to expand its industrial scale and diversify into bioenergy, renewable fuels, and the circular economy.
