Farmer consortium linked to new Silver Fern Farm bid

It was understood the consortium offer was imminent when Rural News went to press. Several industry players had heard of such rumours.

Alliance Group chief executive David Surveyor was asked by Rural News if the cooperative was involved, but he refused to comment on whether the company was part of a renewed offer due to 'commercial reasons'.

However, Surveyor did confirm that this particular group had previously been considered as one of the pathways the Alliance Group could take.

"A consortium to put a proposal to Silver Fern Farms is one of the many models we have considered," he told Rural News last week.

"One of the things we want to make sure our shareholders appreciate is we have not been able to say a lot for legal reasons around Silver Fern Farms as they went through their Goldman Sachs process. But it is important that shareholders and New Zealand farmers know we have put a lot of time into understanding what opportunities there may be."

Surveyor admits the Silver Fern Farms (Shanghai Maling) proposal is a major change for the red meat sector.

"We've done a lot of work on our strategy, we have really thought deeply about it. That work included Silver Fern Farms, but Silver Fern is not critical to our strategy. We've got confidence that what we've got works. We have something really robust that creates a huge amount of upside for farmers."

Surveyor says over the years Alliance Group looked many times at opportunities for mergers and acquisitions with Silver Fern Farms.

"We have already publicly stated, before the capital raising programme, we had an offer that had been rejected," he says. "Over the last 12 months the management and the board have worked really hard to review opportunities around Silver Fern Farms. We have continued to think about them but we are not compelled by them in terms of our strategy.

"We have looked at them, we have done the work, but the company (Alliance) hasn't found something that makes sense," Surveyor told Rural News.

"Silver Fern Farms would have done exactly the same thing; they would have been looking over the fence at Alliance Group asking themselves the same questions and the two businesses have never collectively found a model that creates enough economic wealth or value for this [merger] to happen."

Surveyor says the two companies already cooperate on a number of projects. Alliance Group, Silver Fern Farms and Anzco are all members of The Lamb Company, a joint venture for the supply of sheepmeat to North America. He says both companies are also members of the Meat Industry Association and share safety information with each other.

He points out that it doesn't matter who owns Silver Fern Farms as this will not prevent the ability to talk and do things together, but they are also competitors.

Meat Industry Excellence chairman Peter McDonald says they do hope there is a farmer controlled option for Silver Fern Farms put forward to shareholders.

"MIE is not trying to put a spanner in the works of this proposal, but we feel all the options should be there for voters and all the questions should be answered before they vote," he says.