Dutch agricultural software company Agrovision has announced to take over the system GTEP from the Spanish research institute Irta. The Dutch company has won the public bid around this acquisition. GTEP is a management system for sows and finishers.
Spain has a very professional pig production industry with 2.5 million sows, which makes it twice as big as the Dutch market. Through this acquisition, Agrovision has enlarged its circle of customers. The reduction in size on the Dutch market is thus compensated, which allows Agrovision to continue investing in innovations. Apart from that, Agrovision has increased her knowledge of the international pig market through this take-over, which has a spin off on other international markets where Agrovision is present.
In Spain, there are four parties offering management systems. Until the acquisition, Irta’s market share was about 60%. Agrovision had about 30%, which makes the company now the biggest player having 90% of the market share.
Irta is the research centre of the Catalan government and is connected to the University of Lleida. Irta focuses on searching towards technical innovations on the basis of scientific research. Irta researches for both the primary agricultural sector and also the agribusiness and agrifood industry. For scientific research back in the eighties, Irta needed practical results from a pig farm. For that reason, the comparative system BP-Porc was developed. To feed this programme, the computer programme GTEP was also developed.