Mr. Hafner: We're an international food company. We started in 1911 as a regional rice miller, and since then we have grown to become a leading processor, marketer and distributor of branded and private label rice products here in the United States and Europe, and in Central America, of cookies, crackers, juices, ketchup and other canned goods. In the US, we are the volume leader in the 1.2 billion retail rice category. Our competitors include Mars' Uncle Ben's, Kraft's Minute Rice, PepsiCo's Rice-a- Roni and various regional players. We have the number one regular rice, Mahatma', which has been on the market since 1932, the number one instant boil-in-bag rice, Success', which is also the number two instant rice after Minute, and Carolina' Rice, New York's favorite rice, which has been on the market since 1928. We have various regional brands such as WaterMaid', Sello Rojo', and El Mago'. We have specialty rices as well including wild rice, sold under Gourmet House' and S&W' brands. In addition, we are the number one seller of quick-cooking rice to the foodservice industry and to other food processors. In Central America, our brands Kern's', Ducal' and Fun-C', are leaders in ketchup, fruit juices and refried beans and our brand Pozuelo' is the number one cookie and cracker brand in Central America. Central America is a market of over 35 million consumers. It's a good, growing market. Our competitors there are Nabisco, UniLever and various local players. In Europe, our UK subsidiary distributes brand name and private label rice, dried fruit and other food products in the UK. Then we have a Belgian subsidiary, which has joint venture operations and mills in Belgium and Germany. We market and distribute private label and industrial rice products and rice cakes throughout Europe. Bosto' is the number one rice brand in Belgium, and our brand Oryza' is the number two rice brand in Germany. We have completed a new rice cake facility in Belgium, which is the most modern in Europe and are transferring production. That's an overview of the different businesses we're in, here in the US, Central America and in Europe. A couple of very interesting events have occurred over the past year. The first is that we completed the acquisition of the ACH Food Companies' rice specialty business in February of this year. The acquisition price was 24 million, and they had sales of about 35 million. This acquisition gives us the additional instant rice processing capacity we needed because of growing sales. It also gives us the capacity to process IQF (individually quick- frozen) rice, which we did not previously have. We were in dry processing, but now we have the market and processing facility for frozen rice, so we're excited about that opportunity. We also, as part of this acquisition, acquired their China Doll' brand, which is a large regional brand in both rice and beans. We're in the process of integrating these units into our business, and we're very excited about the possibility for further increased growth, especially in instant, quick-cooking rice.
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