Beverages Industry in Rondônia: Dydyo Soft Drinks
Dydyo is a soft drinks company which has been acting in the market for more than 11 years. Its Director, Cley Muniz, discusses distribution, expansion plans and challenges. He also shares his vision for the future and talks about the inauguration of his plastic recycling company.
Interview with Cley Muniz, Director of Refrigerantes Dydyo
Let’s start by introducing Dydyo. I would like to know a bit about the company’s history, the products that you sell, the key aspects of the company.
Now that there is the highway to the Pacific we are going to serve more cities between Bolivia and Peru. We also have an expansion project in order to obtain distribution points that are located further away.
Dydyo was born out of the dream of two youngsters, Robson and I. I was 19 years old and he was 22 years old and we had a dream of having our own business. So we had a talk with our parents and they decided to support our business at the time, and that is when Dydyo started to come to fruition. Initially, it was a very small company; it began to expand throughout the years and we have been continuously growing in the market for 11.5 years. What is interesting about when Dydyo started is that we saw a need for some investments in the market at that moment, we occupied a space and we became a highlight due to our cola flavour.
Since the distance between Rondônia, São Paulo and other states is somewhat great, we also felt we needed to manufacture our own bottles. So we built the first soda factory in the Northern region that manufactured its own bottles. We bought the resin and we made our own preform and until today we still make our own bottles, this was a huge differential in the market that helped us grow in the past years.
When Dydyo started out, we had five basic flavours: orange, lime, grape, guaraná, and cola (which has always been our greatest success). Today, our cola, in terms of taste, stands out in the national market. It’s a very good cola. As a differential from other companies in Brazil, apart from the multinational brands, our flagship product is our cola. After that, we expanded to different bottle sizes. We started out with two litre bottles, and after we started to increase our production, we went on to 500ml, 250ml, and today we also have cans. We produce our own energy drink, juices and ultimately other types of products.
We also acquired Águas Kaiary which is a company that is a leader in the regional market, and one of the companies in our group represents DKS. DKS is the representative of Brasil Kirin which carries some beer brands, such as Devassa, Baden-Baden, Glacial, Nova Schin and Nobel, and other beverage products here in Brazil.
How big is Dydyo in terms of the workforce? How many employees do you have at the moment?
Today, we have 500 employees which are directly employed through us.
You distribute your products within Rondônia as well as to other Brazilian states and also abroad. Can you please talk some more about your exports?
We sell our products to the state of Rondônia; we’ve expanded to some cities in Mato Grosso and the states of Amazonas and Acre, and we also sell our products to the cities on the border of Bolivia and Brazil.
Do you have plans of expanding more on a national and international scale?
Yes, we do. Now that there is the highway to the Pacific we are going to serve more cities between Bolivia and Peru. We also have an expansion project in order to obtain distribution points that are located further away.
You recently inaugurated a plastic recycling company; can you tell me more about this initiative?
Our recycling company is called Amazon RCP, which was born from one of our dreams of always being ahead in terms of projects. We looked at a lot of propaganda discussing the environment, but in essence, the companies weren’t doing something directly. We decided to set up a recycling company that actually buys the PET bottles. We bought them from the associations of trash gatherers, garbage dumps and landfills, where no one knew what to do with the bottles, then we pressed them, transformed them into resin and sold them to the textile industries. We bought plastic bottles from Amazonas, Mato Grosso, Acre, Rondônia and from other Brazilian states.
What are Dydyo’s greatest challenges?
Dydyo’s greatest challenges are related to the task of knowing how to grow. We have plans of building another soda manufacturing unit this year and we have projects of other businesses within our group, but there is also the challenge of the Brazilian economy showing you that you can be more comfortable so you know that you can grow properly within the following years.
Are there any partnership opportunities or investment opportunities with a national or international investor?
In Brazil there are always opportunities for something like that, but it really depends on a case by case basis: it depends on who the investor is and what he/she wants to invest in. There are always partnership possibilities, but we would need to analyze the type of partnership in order for us to evaluate if it is viable or not.
Are you seeking any partnership opportunities at the moment?
No, currently we aren’t seeking any partnership opportunities.
What do you envision for the future of Dydyo? How do you see the company in 2-3 years and what is your dream in the long run?
I’ve always liked growing and developing to the maximum point, so my dream is to open up more factories in Brazil, especially because our flagship product is cola, which makes us different from the rest of the local market.
Do you have any plans of opening up any factories abroad?
We started to do a very superficial analysis of some cities in Bolivia. However, there is still a lot of room for us to grow in Brazil, so we are first thinking of occupying that space in Brazil and then we would go on from there and think about starting up partnerships in other countries.
What would be your assessment on investment opportunities in Rondônia?
The state of Rondônia is in a geographic position which is very favourable to investors. It is in a strategic location in terms of types of freight. The majority of merchandise that supplies the state of Amazonas and Acre comes through here. The trucks that come here have to go back to São Paulo, so there is a possibility to encompass the Southeast with cheaper logistics costs than from São Paulo to here. A strategic point of the Northern Region is that there are some new emerging states, so this means that there are still a lot of investment opportunities. What’s interesting is that in the last few years, Brazil has organized itself a lot, so today the laws work and the government organizations work, giving an investor more security which is different to some of our neighbouring countries that are unstable. You get there and they are one thing and when you go back they are different, in Brazil this doesn’t occur so often anymore.