AUSTRALIA-BANKERS GET INTO FARMING IN A BIG WAY.The Macquarie Pastoral Group has made its long-anticipated thrust into Australia’s Top End cattle country with the purchase of three well-known station properties in Queensland and the Northern Territory for $169 million..
The deal represents an alleged purchase price of around $1700 per beast area.
The group last week confirmed it had bought the renowned breeding properties:
Armraynald Station, Burketown (Qld),
Walhallow Station, Tennant Creek (NT) and
The Queensland Channel Country fattening property, Davenport Downs.
All were owned by the Georgina Pastoral Co of Queensland’s cattlemen Peter Hughes and Bill Scott, who acquired the properties variously from the former Colonial and Stanbroke cattle empires.
Together, they amount to about 2.4 million hectares of country with a combined carrying capacity of around 100,000 head of cattle.
The deal, which comes just weeks after Macquarie’s purchase of Burindi/Lugwardine at Barraba and Euroka at Conargo, includes stock and plant.
It comes amid continuing speculation about Queensland divestment of Australian Agricultural Co stations and rumoured moves by James Packer to quit his Consolidated Pastoral northern beef empire..
High debt levels across the Queensland beef industry - after the buying spree that followed the Stanbroke Pastoral Co sell off in 2003 - are understood to be a motivating factor driving sales.
Macquarie Pastoral Group chief executive, David Goodfellow, said the Top End is now a ’buyer’s market’, and stations that had appeared too dear 12 months ago now had become good value. He said Macquarie’s broader strategy was to invest in four key areas, northern NSW, the Riverina, the Top End and another undisclosed area.
The latest deal, which has been in train for several months but still took market-watchers by surprise, propels Macquarie in one stroke into the big league of northern cattle producers.
Mr Goodfellow said although the precise number of stock on hand was unknown, he expected the first muster to confirm the presence of ’more than 90,000 head’.
"These won’t be the last stations we buy there," he predicted.
As with most of its earlier acquisitions, existing staff are being retained at all three stations, including managers Cameron Fulcher (Walhallow), Zac Duff (Armraynald) and Cheyne Williams (Davenport).
Macquarie Pastoral Fund is now well advanced towards raising the $1.3 billion it had set as a target for investment in a chain of sheep and cattle properties across eastern and northern Australia.
Meanwhile the two Georgina Pastoral Co partners are going their separate ways in the wake of the three-station sale.
The deal signals the end of a five year partnership between Peter Hughes and the Scott family of Western Queensland.
Mr Hughes had bought out the Scotts’ 20pc stake in Georgina, although George Scott will stay on as manager of Lake Nash Station.
He says the dissolution of the business relationship was ’absolutely amicable’.
George Scott agrees and says Georgina has enjoyed excellent capital gains from its property portfolio over the past five years.
Mr Hughes, who will retain the Georgina Pastoral Co name, will seek to consolidate and reinvest in his remaining 2 million hectare empire including his family station, Tierawoomba at Nebo, west of Mackay.
His former partner, Bill Scott, will manage his own stations including the 280,000ha Thylungra at Quilpie, bought late last year from Clyde Agriculture and Milo also in south west Queensland.
Operating as Georgina Pastoral Co, Mr Hughes and Mr Scott (former director and area manager respectively of Stanbroke) made headlines in 2006 when they paid more than $300m to secure the rural property portfolio of Colonial Pastoral Co.
