Macquarie amalgamates agribusiness divisions
Macquarie has rolled its two agriculture businesses into one new business as part of a strategy to provide scale to expand its operations overseas.
The new business, Macquarie Agricultural Funds Management, comprises Macquarie’s Pastoral Fund business and its forestry and almond managed investment schemes (MISs) business.
The wholesale Pastoral Fund, which was launched in May last year, was previously part of Macquarie banking and financial services group while the longstanding retail MIS projects were part of the funds management group.
Together, the two groups will bring the size of the new division to 45 staff members, who will collectively manage about 105,000 hectares in Australia across various agricultural sectors.
It will also swell the new division’s funds under management (FUM) to about $1 billion, allowing the group to expand its retail offerings in other markets and its wholesale offerings to other forms of agricultural beyond pastoral.
“We are looking at a diversified retail offering in places [such as] Europe and the Middle East and also at opportunities to develop our wholesale fund offering,” said Anthony Abraham, co-chief executive of the new division.
Formerly executive director of Macquarie Funds Group, Abraham will share the business’ chief executive duties with Macquarie executive director Craig Swanger.
Abraham told Money Management the new division “underlines our view of agriculture as an area of opportunity, notwithstanding the current state of the market”.
“As we started to expand our business we saw there was an opportunity for management overlays to happen and for us to thereby offer a lot more fund expertise across the board to our investors,” he said.
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