ABSTRACT
By the time he became chief engineer for United Plantations and Bernam Oil Palms in 1959, Børge Bek-Nielsen had already become dissatisfied with the established range of strategic options pursued by European plantation companies in Malaysia. To acquire more land and plant more trees, in Malaysia or abroad; to introduce new crops, to improve yields in field and factory, and to improve oil quality so as to meet the requirements of new Western buyers: all these aims were still worth pursuing, but they were not new. As the decade of the 1960s wore on, Bek and his key allies, the Grut brothers together with Ole Schwensen and Leo Ebbesen, felt increasingly strongly that new avenues should be explored. Rapidly expanding Malaysian palm oil output, rising competition from alternative vegetable oils and the obvious limits to overall market growth in mature European economies, all suggested to them that fresh markets should be sought in Asia and new products should be developed to suit them. If the existing European refineries and trade networks could not meet this challenge, Bek felt that producers in Malaysia should waste no time in setting up their own.
