Ausbuy

National Foods Seeks Permission To Acquire Dairy Farmers

April 23rd, 2008

Japanese owned National Foods has approached the ACCC for permission to acquire Australian owned co-op Dairy Farmers.

National Foods is owned by beer maker Kirin Brewery and has recently been strengthening their overseas presence. National Foods was Australia’s largest dairy company until being bought, originally by Philippine-owned Miguel Corp who then sold to Kirin last year.

The offer is expected to be around $900 million.

Dairy Farmers is a co-operative owned by around 2,300 farmers and is one of the last large Australian-owned dairy producers. Brands include Cracker Barrel, COON, dare, OAK, moove, shape and Ski.

Also interested in acquiring the company are New Zealand-owned Fonterra and Italian-owned Parmalat.

The ACCC has been asked to comment on whether the acquisition will damage competition in the dairy industry and expect to reveal their findings in June. As far as we know no approach has been made to the Foreign Investment Review Board.

Dairy Farmers began in 1900 as a group of dairy farmers from New South Wales’ Illawarra region joining forces to market their milk and butter to people in the city. After their market grew farmers from other states were encouraged to join. It has grown to be one of the largest dairy producers in Australia and sell over one million products a day. Dairy Farmers is an important Australian-owned company and markets itself as being “as Australian as it gets”, “100% owned by the Aussie farmers who supply the milk”.

Ausbuy would like to see Dairy Farmers remain in Australian hands. Should it be sold to a foreign-owned multinational we would see the loss of another Aussie icon overseas and the domestic dairy market dominated by foreign-owned brands. Is this what Australians want? Dairy Farmers was formed by Australian farmers to ensure that their dairy products were properly marketed and that the farmers got a fair price for their milk. Will that happen if the marketing and distribution of our dairy products are handled by overseas companies? This is unlikely.

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1. Its quite obvious that the first priority of the foreign owned Dairyfarmers will be to screw down the milk price for the farmer and rip off the consumer with a higher price for milk.
   Australian farmers have lost their own company which means they can set the price to make their industry viable.They will be exploited by foreign sharks with foreign headquarters who will end up controlling our milk industry.

   THATS IF WE ARE DUMBER ENOUGH TO LET THEM AND WE ARE DUMB ENOUGH TO BUY THEIR BRANDS.

   The alternative is to support the 100% Australian owned companies Devondale and Bega cheese.These are the last 2 Dairy owned cooperatives left in Australia that are still owned by Aussie farmers and have a large supermarket pressence Australia wide.
   Currently their is around about 4 cooperatives left owned by Aussie farmers another cooperative is Sunrice which needs our support.
   Australians may complain that rice uses a high volume of water but it is still an industry which employs many rural Australians who would not have employment if it were not for Sunrice so please support it.

   Comment by eyeluvozzie — April 23, 2008 @ 7:14 pm

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