Over the next thirty years, the brothers' business interests began to focus predominantly on cotton from the East Indies.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the firms had grown to become two of the United Kingdom's leading cotton merchants and in 1962 the two companies agreed to merge, forming Ralli Brothers and Coney.

Shortly after the formation of Smith, Coney, and Barrat, Adolphe and Morris Hohenberg formed their partnership in the United States to trade cotton and dry goods in 1879.

Ralli Brothers and Coney's strengths were in the trading of cotton from the Indian sub-continent and Africa, which complemented the fields of expertise, which Cargill Inc. already possessed through their Memphis, Tennessee, USA based cotton-trading company, Hohenberg Brothers Inc. From these two small family ventures evolved one of the largest cotton merchandising concerns in the history of the world.

Thus the combination of strengths became complete as the cotton business unit assumed the name of its 100 billion-dollar parent company.