JBS

JBS operates at a scale that would be biologically impossible without industrial agriculture: $77.2 billion revenue in 2024 processing cattle, pigs, and chickens across four continents. The company reversed a BRL 1.1 billion loss in 2023 to BRL 9.6 billion profit in 2024, driven by coordinated expansion across protein types. This is horizontal integration as apex predation—JBS doesn't specialize in one prey species, it dominates multiple food chains simultaneously. Q3 2025 revenue hit $22.6 billion (13% growth) with gains across all business units. The metabolic efficiency shows in raw numbers: 75% domestic sales, 25% exports, capturing value whether animals are consumed locally or shipped globally.

The biological strategy is portfolio diversification at industrial scale. When beef faces headwinds (North American cattle at historic lows, prices historically high), pork and chicken compensate. Seara's value-added business posted 322% EBITDA growth in 2024 to $1.5 billion, showing margin expansion from vertical integration into processed foods. JBS South America beef grew 13% to $12.6 billion with 106% EBITDA gain. Australia beef jumped 7% to $6.6 billion with 46% EBITDA growth. This is what scaling laws predict: a sufficiently large organism can absorb regional shocks through geographic and product diversification that smaller competitors can't match.

But watch the underlying dynamics. CEO Wesley Batista Filho projects 2025-early 2026 as "bottom of the cycle" for North American beef, with gradual improvement by 2027-2028. This is JBS acknowledging that even apex predators face resource constraints they can't control—cattle populations follow biological cycles that industrial processing can't override. The NYSE listing (June 2025) alongside B3 provides capital access to fund counter-cyclical expansion. The $5 million Trump inauguration donation signals JBS understands that meat processing operates at the intersection of agriculture, trade policy, and food security—political relationships matter when you control enough protein to affect national food supplies. The company isn't just processing meat. It's managing the industrial ecology of global protein consumption. At this scale, biological limits (animal reproduction rates, land carrying capacity, feed conversion ratios) become strategic constraints that money alone can't solve.