ONE of Australia's largest Chinese landholders, Rifa Salutary Pty Ltd, is selling its entire agricultural portfolio.
It is estimated to be worth more than $150 million and covers about 44,000 hectares.
The offering includes 14 properties consolidated into five main operational hubs, comprising:
- Blackwood station, Dunkeld, Victoria, of 2405ha;
- Kulwin Park station, in the Wycheproof district of the Southern Mallee in Western Victoria, measuring 4390ha;
- Cooplacurripa station, east of Nowendoc, New South Wales, of 23,977ha;
- Ashleigh station, Gravesend, NSW, of 4391ha;
- Middlebrook station, Nundle, NSW, measuring 8613ha.
Rifa Salutary is the Australian arm of China's Zhejiang Rifa Holding Group, which has significant investments in the specialist and machinery textiles sectors, aeronautical and aviation, finance and agriculture in China and internationally.
The company started its Australian agricultural investment in 2014 with the purchase of Blackwood station for about $14m.
In the five years to follow, Rifa Salutary injected hundreds of millions of dollars of capital into its agricultural investments, including buying more land and developing its properties.
Rifa Salutary spent more than $100m in 2016 on boosting its agricultural land investments, including buying Cooplacurripa station plus 5000 head of cattle for $32m.
The same year, the company bought Kooroon and Middlebrook Park (which later became the larger landholding of Middlebrook station) for $55m.
Kulwin Park and McNicholl's, south of Tamworth, NSW, were bought in 2017 for $55m.
According to its website, Rifa Salutary owns 22,000 head of cattle, 5000 sheep and 3000ha of cropping land.
Its operations included breeding, backgrounding and fattening for high-quality beef cattle and meat sheep.
Rifa Salutary director and Rifa Holding Group vice president Bobby Jiang said the company felt the time was right to capture value as a result of completed targeted capital expenditure and improvement programs across the portfolio, as well as underlying value growth.
The portfolio was officially listed on the market last week and the marketing campaign is being handled by Danny Thomas and Col Medway, CBRE.
Mr Thomas said the listing would provide the future owner with significant opportunity, given the positive outlook for the beef industry, as well as the potential to be realised through additional investment in infrastructure and genetics.
"This is a business that has demonstrated excellent resilience through some difficult climatic conditions in the past two years," Mr Thomas said.
"The maintenance of great genetics across the operation's 20,000 head of beef cattle during this period is a testament to the team managing this portfolio."
Mr Medway said the portfolio offered great climatic diversification and had proven production properties and finishing hubs.
"All of that hard work has been done to aggregate these properties into scalable assets," Mr Medway said.
Rifa Salutary Australia chief executive officer Cameron Hall said the business was well established for the future with recent investment in on-farm infrastructure and improvement programs.
"There is still work to be done - which gives a purchaser good promise - but the foundations and team are in place to take the business forward," Mr Hall said.
In the Australian Taxation Office's Register of Foreign Ownership of Agricultural Land report, as at June 30, 2018, Chinese companies held 9169 million hectares of Australian agricultural land (2017-18).
The report also stated that it was the second highest foreign owner of Australian farmland, after the United Kingdom with 10,239mha (2017-18).
