Yara span out of Norsk Hydro back in 2004, and is a large fertiliser company listed in Norway, with global operations in the upstream and downstream of agricultural chemical supply chains. We thought the company was misunderstood because of the underappreciated ownership of distribution, storage and logistics assets. We conducted three deep dives into the operations in UK, France and Brazil, pulling local filings to show hidden assets and problematic cost positions in some production regions. We eventually presented our views to the management in Oslo. Whilst this was a compelling activist idea, we eventually dropped the name because of the slow pace of change and bigger challenges to commodity production of fertilisers in Europe. We published 14 notes in three years and also covered comps such as OCI and Covestro in the chemicals space.
