Netafim and the Precision Irrigation Export
Netafim is the largest single Israeli agritech export by revenue and the institutional anchor of the global drip-irrigation category. The Mexichem (Orbia) ownership has changed the strategic posture.
The institution
Netafim — founded at Kibbutz Hatzerim in 1965 — is the global category leader in drip irrigation. It pioneered the technology, scaled it across two generations of agricultural intensification, and is now a global manufacturing-and-services business with operations across Latin America, Asia, Europe, and North America.
The ownership transition
Netafim was acquired by Mexichem (now Orbia Advance Corporation) in 2018 in a transaction valued at approximately USD 1.5 billion (for the share Mexichem acquired) and a total enterprise value materially higher. The acquisition shifted Netafim from a kibbutz-anchored Israeli industrial firm to a subsidiary inside a Mexican-listed multinational, with the Israeli operating base preserved.
The current footprint
Netafim operates manufacturing plants across more than fifteen countries and serves agricultural customers across all major irrigation-relevant geographies. The strategic frontier is now the digitisation layer — sensor-driven precision systems, plant-level water and nutrient management, the integration into precision-agriculture platforms — where Netafim faces newer Israeli entrants (Taranis, Phytech, Prospera-now-Valmont) and global competitors.
Why this matters
Netafim is the institutional proof that Israeli agritech can scale beyond a startup category into a multi-billion-dollar global industrial business. Its existence is what gives Israeli agritech — and by extension the climate-and-resource-tech category — its institutional weight. The current generation of Israeli agritech firms is, in part, attempting to repeat the Netafim formula in adjacent verticals.