Great Southern announces new focus
Cameron Rhodes
Agribusiness funds manager Great Southern plans to embark on a major restructure that will create Australia’s largest hardwood plantation forestry business and a new cattle business.
Titled Project Transform, the plan involves Great Southern repositioning itself with three separate streams of forestry, agricultural investment services and cattle.
The aim is to combine the company’s key asset — high value agricultural land — with the tree and cattle assets of selected managed investment schemes (MIS).
In doing so, the manager hopes to reduce operating costs while improving earnings and cash flow to a level where Great Southern’s market capitalisation would be $800 million.
The company’s managing director, Cameron Rhodes, said if approved, the restructure would add significant value to stakeholders.
“We will be an integrated forestry business and have additional revenue and cash flows from both forestry and cattle to complement our existing tax effective MIS business,” he said.
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