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Bloomberg
Padenga Holdings Ltd., the world’s largest supplier of Nile crocodile skins for luxury handbags and shoes, is seeking to boost profitability by feeding the aquatic reptiles a corn-rich diet and allowing them more space to grow. The company’s biggest market for hides is Italy, the home of luxury goods makers including Prada Spa, which sells a crocodile and python-skin handbag for 2,900 pounds ($4,098). Padenga’s sales of crocodile meat in Europe surged by 25 percent in 2015, helping the company to boost profit. The diet and larger pens will help the crocodiles grow faster and improve the quality of their hides, Oliver Kamundimu, Padenga’s finance director, said in an interview last week in the Zimbabwe lakeside town of Kariba, where the company is based and close to where its farms are located. The downside for the crocodiles is that they will be slaughtered
after two and a half years rather than three, he said.