The opportunity

Portico’s Managing Partner developed a multi-country expansion plan for a firm providing agricultural monitoring technology services.

The company dominated market share in its home region, but needed to secure partnerships in adjacent markets to reach farmers without incurring the cost of building distribution networks from scratch.  

The services—including precision soil/crop monitoring and data-driven yield forecasting—enabled rainfall-dependent farms to make smarter decisions around input allocation, planting, and water management in the face of growing climate stress.

The solution

The market-sizing and partner-ranking exercise focused on the size of the addressable market for agricultural monitoring services in each country, customer willingness to spend, and the extent of farm network coverage offered by the best distribution partners. Partner categories included soft commodity traders; agro-dealers; banks with rural branch networks; fertilizer and seed companies; and FMCG companies with last-mile distribution networks. 

The best partners identified were rural e-commerce platforms that already offered farmers a wide selection of inputs, insurance, and extension services. This created opportunities to bundle the client’s agronomic testing services with existing products, rather than developing a standalone service that would require high investment in customer education. 

As an additional filter, the client was advised to prioritize markets with large export-focused cash crop sectors, where ROI on the purchase of productivity-improving agronomic services is higher than in domestic food staples.  

Finally, a medium-term opportunity was identified to utilize the company’s services to offer a carbon measurement service to larger commercial farms, designed to baseline and verify carbon offset/credit schemes.