SEAF backs tea company
Private equity manager SEAF, in partnership with the US Development Finance Corporation (DFC), USAID, and ABCapital, have announced the close of an investment in Orient Tea, a fast-growing Tunisian food company. The investment was made through SEAF’s Tunisia Resilience Fund and SEAF Covid-19 Global Gender Lens Emergency Loan Finance, an investment vehicle funded by the DFC that focuses on addressing the impact of Covid-19 on SMEs supporting women.
Founded in 2013, Orient Tea is a food company that produces instant natural tea products under the brand Kyufi. Orient Tea operates in Ben Arous, a city in northeastern Tunisia that experienced the early effects of Covid and faced restrictive lockdowns and the closure of key distribution channels. Orient Tea quickly adopted an agile and proactive method to tackle this crisis by pivoting towards retail and B2B networks. To scale, Orient Tea required capital to enhance its digital presence and online brand awareness, as well as improve and extend its warehousing capacity in light of supply chain disruptions.
With SEAF’s funding, Orient Tea can increase its production capacity, expand into new export markets, and enhance the company’s positioning while creating jobs and providing sustainable training to smallholder farmers in its network.
“The Tunisian market has been experiencing a challenging time and we are pleased to partner with Orient Tea as part of their expansion,” shares Jan Cherim, SEAF vice chair for Europe and Africa. “We’re proud of the work achieved by our team led by Ingrid Chou who worked successfully with ABCapital and Orient Tea to get this deal completed. We anticipate more investment closings similar to this one in the future.”
“ABCapital is delighted to be supporting SEAF through the Orient Tea transaction execution and through the implementation of a new, alternative and competitive financing mechanism – the Tunisian Resilience Fund, that is not only catalysing additional capital for Tunisian SMEs but supporting their post-Covid resilience plans and unlocking their growth potential,” noted ABCapital in a statement.
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