Dekker Chrysanten Based in Hensbroek in the province of North Holland, Dekker Chrysanten is a family-owned business with roots in agriculture and horticulture. In the early 1960s the company decided to concentrate entirely on cut flowers and, in just a few decades, evolved from a small-scale grower to one of the largest chrysanthemum growers in the world. Learn more about the power of innovation and taking calculated risks.
Some things sound easy, but turn out to be pretty complex. Growing chrysanthemums is a good example, a craft which Dekker Chrysanten controls to perfection. The labour-intensive work of taking cuttings from parent plants by hand is done at the Dekker nurseries in Tanzania and Bolivia. Three times a week several million unrooted cuttings are air freighted to the Netherlands where the production process is fully automated.
Held in specially developed plastic strips, the extremely fragile cuttings are transported by monorail from large cold storage units to ten or so sticking machines, where they are automatically inserted into potting blocks. Once the cuttings have developed roots in ideal conditions they are delivered to chrysanthemum growers all over the world and grown for sale as cut flowers.
Dekker also specialises in developing new chrysanthemum varieties and has become a leading player in this sector of the industry. Following the successful launch of the first commercial Dekker variety (the ‘Vesuvio’) in 1993, the company began to concentrate on producing its own varieties and developed a system for launching these new varieties on the market on a regular basis. In 2005 the company created a sensation in the plant breeding world with the launch of the ‘Madiba’, a totally new type of chrysanthemum with unique properties: the highly decorative flowers are easy to cultivate and last for a very long time.
Growing the company to its current size required investments running into several millions, which were financed with a mixture of equity capital and funds provided by Rabo in its capacity as the company’s main bank. Because the firm has always had a consistently strong solvency ratio, director-owner Cees Dekker cannot recall the bank ever refusing a loan.
So the company never seriously considered raising external capital in any other way. Yet nor did it exclude that possibility as a matter of principle. Dekker: “Of course it may well be something we consider in the future, if, for example, the bank is not prepared to extend further credit. We can only see a couple of years ahead in this respect. But we will only bring in a minority shareholder. I won’t be seeking an investor who wants a say in the future direction of the company.”
