Fonterra’s farmer shareholders have voted overwhelmingly in favour of the sale of the brands like Mainland and Anchor to a French company.
More than 88 percent of the votes cast at a special meeting backed the $4.2 billion sale to French dairy giant Lactalis.
ASB Bank estimated the sale proceeds would ultimately be worth about $4.5b to the economy, with farmer shareholders receiving an average tax-free payout of about $392,000 if the sale went ahead.
The sale to the world’s biggest dairy group, French-based Lactalis, is the final step in Fonterra’s transition to a slimmed-down New Zealand-based supplier of raw ingredients and high-value products to other manufacturers.
This is Fonterra (a cooperative of dairy farmers) doubling down on their own myth of being the ‘life blood of the country’ and cutting their noses off to spite their faces in the process.
These are the same entitled fools who got all uppity at maybe having to offset their carbon footprint.
Selling the ‘fancy cheeses’ business is them sticking it to the city folk. Short sighted and poor business, but they get a free $400k today. They’ll get a nasty surprise tomorrow when that income doesn’t come in the dividend anymore.
I’m actually curious about the wider system. Farmers own Fonterra, right? And I believe this is a requirement to sell their milk to them. So if I wanted to go and start a dairy farm and provide milk to Fonterra, I’d have to buy an appropriate number of shares, right?
So if this sale of part of Fonterra has an average payout of almost $400k, and presumably this is not the bulk of the value of Fonterra, then that must mean that farmers are paying millions of dollars to buy Fonterra shares just to start a farm?
As soon as the supply deal ends, Kapiti ice cream is going to be made from milk from everywhere but Kapiti.
And we’re still going to have it on our shelves, and we’re going to be charged a premium for Kapiti ice cream from Poland.
Any fool can see that a French owner is immediately going to source raw materials from the EU as soon as possible.
I think this one is interesting. There was a post the other day about how NZ makes raw materials then ships it to other countries for them to create the high value products.
Fonterra is literally selling the high value part to focus on the raw material part.
That seems like the dumbest decision ever. A perfect example of short term thinking. Go to any country in Europe and they will have a hundred different kinds of cheeses representing every nook and cranny of the country. Each cheese has a story about the climate or the cows or grass or the air or the aging or whatnot and as a result they cost a premium. We just sell the milk powder, they make artisan bespoke cheese and sell it back to us.
