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NL: Royal FloraHolland CEO gives January 2025 update

In this article Royal FloraHolland's CEO Pieter Bootsma shares his perspective on the past and/or coming month. The following is his perspective on the month of January.

We've hit the ground running. We started January with my first video message and now here is my first monthly column. In it, I would like to take you through the developments in our cooperative. There is quite a lot in the pipeline. Therefore, I cannot but be selective in the topics I address. The common thread for RFH is formed by the four goals I discussed in the video at the beginning of January: positive results, concrete strategy choices, investing in our logistics hubs and a future-proof cooperative. Our platform is, so to speak, the 'highway' in floriculture, providing an optimal logistics and digital infrastructure that the whole sector uses. This platform and the cooperative need to be maintained and future-proofed. That is why we have drawn up a plan until 2030 with concrete steps and investments so that we can respond to increasing legislation and regulations, safety requirements and sustainability. We will discuss this with the Supervisory Board, members' council and members' council soon. Regarding our first objective, I am proud that we can already report that we have written black figures for 2024. That was a hard promise to our members and what you promise you want to deliver.

It is great that even in the first month of the new year we are already showing great results. Prices for both cut flowers and houseplants were well above those of the same month a year ago. Buyers also paid higher prices for products with more supply. That makes me optimistic. I attended the kick-off of the tulip season at Museumplein. The picking garden with 200,000 tulips was again a great success. Thousands of interested people from all over the world braved the cold and enjoyed the colorful flower garden. It proves how popular fresh flowers are even today. The next important day is Valentine's Day on Friday, February 14. My friends at KLM Cargo have promised us to deploy enough cargo capacity to the Netherlands to meet the high demand from home and abroad.

Last week, I visited the IPM in Essen. This is only logical, as Germany is our main export market. In that market, our joint venture Veiling Rhein-Maas (VRM) plays an important role. Over 60 percent of VRM's revenue comes from supplies from our members. As we know, major shareholders Landgard and RFH jointly commissioned a strategic study on the future of VRM last year. The joint goal is to further strengthen VRM. I had a very good conversation with my colleague Oliver Manns, CEO of Landgard. With a strong VRM in a strategic location just across the border in Germany, we can strategically expand our network of hubs. There really are win-win opportunities here.

Of course, we are not sitting still ourselves. We recently started an experiment with multi-transaction auctioning (MTV) on clock C08. The speed of auctioning on that clock increased by over 13 percent (a time gain of 20 minutes), and at the same time, there was about 5 per cent better pricing. This is important for support among both growers and buyers. Based on these results, we decided to extend MTV to all rose clocks. Another significant milestone is the commissioning of the new order picking algorithm at our hub in Rijnsburg. This is a very important step for Royal FloraHolland. This algorithm improves routing within the order picking process. This is going to provide further necessary efficiency improvements.

Finally, I would like to stress the importance of further sustainability in our sector. I look at ourselves first. We can achieve a lot by making our hubs more sustainable: reduction of CO2 emissions and energy consumption. A sustainable floriculture sector also includes sustainable logistics. As a sector, we will also have to take steps. In this respect, 1 January 2026 is an important milestone in our roadmap to a sustainable future with FSI certification for the majority of our growers. Clarity regarding the content and pricing of the small-scale grower scheme will be provided in this quarter. This is necessary to maintain support for floriculture in society and politics.

Source: Royal FloraHolland

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