LAUSR

Due to changes in agribusiness, agricultural cooperatives, guided by local operations, and with low added value, have been looking for new ways of structuring. We aimed to identify the forms of structuration and financial-accounting peculiarities of agricultural cooperatives with higher volume of sales in the Brazilian context under the point of view of noncooperatives in the same segment. The work started with a documentary analysis and an accounting technique, named vertical analysis; in the next step, we used Mann-Whitney test to compare the formative lines of DRE of the a set of 15 cooperatives and 14 non-cooperative companies discriminated as belonging to organizations with higher sales in agricultural production in 2013. The results confirm the extent of the cooperatives structure in relation to the business portfolio, given the remarkable activities in concentric and conglomerate diversification. We observed the competitive parity between the business segments analyzed, mainly because there were no differences in the final rates of “profitability” when we compare the two cases. In addition, we can apparently refute the idea that this competitive parity is given by an orientation excessively directed to the market, at the expense of a social orientation, given the differentiating points externalized.