Friday, March 29, 2024

Fonterra not changing structure

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Fonterra won’t be changing its ownership structure but is keen on finding partners to fund future projects, director Scott St John says.
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The co-op’s capital structure has been criticised as making it too hard to raise equity and led to a poor track record of adding value from investments, with one of its harshest critiques coming from First NZ Capital analyst Arie Dekker.

Units in the Fonterra Shareholders’ Fund, which gives investors exposure to the co-operative’s earnings stream, fell to a three-year low last week after the dairy company’s board trimmed its forecast payout to farmers and said it probably won’t pay a final dividend.

St John, a former chief executive of FNZC, put forward the dairy company’s case to the New Zealand Shareholders’ Association annual meeting in Auckland, saying the payout cut was a tough decision but the right call to make and one he would do again.

He gave a potted history of the 17-year-old company, saying its growing expansion in China and successful development of higher-value food ingredients products show it has been successful.

Still, he accepted some of the challenges facing the company had got the better of it.

St John didn’t agree with a question from the floor that Fonterra’s 10,500 farmer-shareholders are reluctant to be fully shared up and said changing the ownership structure is just not on the table.

He did, however, say the company needs to think carefully and innovatively how we fund the projects it enters into.

St John said the recent Indian joint venture with Future Consumer to produce consumer and food service producers is probably more likely to be the sort of thing you see us doing.

He was among a line-up of speakers including Finance Minister Grant Robertson, Westpac New Zealand chief economist Dominick Stephens, SkyCity Entertainment Group chief executive Graeme Stephens and Sanford chief executive Volker Kuntsch. – BusinessDesk

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