One of Europe’s leading hemp companies says it is abandoning its operations in Romania after 14 years on the ground.
According to a real estate notice posted earlier this month, Netherlands-based HempFlax Group B.V. is selling its agricultural portfolio that includes nearly 800 hectares of land and farm buildings in the Sebeș–Alba Iulia region in southern Transylvania’s Mureș River basin.
“We will retreat from Romania in total and focus on our West European decortication operation in the Netherlands and our hemp insulation factory in Germany,” CEO Mark Reinders told HempToday. “We will further invest in value adding activities in order to support the profitability of the hemp crop.”
Cushman & Wakefield Echinox, the broker handling the sale, said HempFlax’s exit “follows a reassessment of its strategic focus, where vertical supply chain integration . . . is preferred over bulk production.”
What’s it worth?
While the asking price was not disclosed, with Romanian farmland selling for just below €9,000 per hectare, the land alone could bring HempFlax as much as €7 million.
Cushman & Wakefield Echinox described the site as a large, compact agricultural holding near a modern processing facility in a recognized industrial region. The property includes contiguous farmland, buildings and machinery, including irrigation equipment. HempFlax retained the hemp processing equipment, which it is relocating, according to Reinders.
Early entrant in Romania
HempFlax grew its first crop in Romania in 2012, and acquired the 800 hectares of farmland two years later.
In 2015, the company invested €5 million in a fiber processing factory in Alba County. A christening of the facility attended by officials from the Romanian Agriculture Ministry and the Dutch Embassy was highly symbolic in a country that had once been the world’s fourth-largest hemp exporter.
The facility, with capacity to process four tons of stalks per hour, was supplied by roughly 500 hectares of company-grown hemp for the production of bast fiber and hurd.
HempFlax operations
HempFlax’s Dutch processing operations are centered at its Oude Pekela site in the northern Netherlands, where the company runs large-scale decortication and fiber processing lines. Output from the facility goes into automotive components, construction materials and animal bedding.
Its German factory is a part of the subsidiary HempFlax Building Solutions, 80% of which was acquired by Ireland-based insulation giant Kingspan in 2023. That unit originated with HempFlax’s 2020 acquisition of Nördlingen-based Thermo Natur GmbH & Co. KG and became its manufacturing arm for hemp-based insulation mats and boards under the THERMO HANF brand.
At its farming peak, in 2015, HempFlax was reportedly managing as much as 4,000 hectares of hemp fields across Netherlands, Germany and Romania. Under the company’s strategic shift, it is now managing just 600 hectares of fiber crops, which includes both hemp and flax, according to Reinders.
How big?
HempFlax, founded in 1993, is one of the most recognized names in the global industrial hemp sector. While the private company does not generally release its financial figures, it gave a snapshot in a report for 2020, when it put revenues at €14.5 million, a 43% increase over 2019.
That report highlighted growth across business lines and presented financial results in a format similar to a public-company statement. It came after founder Ben Dronkers announced at the 2019 European Industrial Hemp Association (EIHA) conference in Cologne that HempFlax would go public. However, the company has not moved forward with a listing.