SANTA CAME KNOCKING – TWICE

WE didn’t sell them the Sydney Harbour Bridge. We did even better. We sold them two businesses which promptly lost nearly 70 per cent of their combined value, or a thirst-quenchingly cool $7 billion.

Big Japanese brewer Kerin has put its Lion dairy business on the market. It spent close to $4 billion putting it together. It then promptly wrote them down to asround $2 billion.

The only way it could get close to even that is if the competition czar let one of its big competitors like Saputo do the buying.

Kirin sort of drifted into the Australian dairy business. It came downunder to sell beer and bought one of our two big Aussie brewers, Castlemaine Tooheys.

Then a light bulb went off. Beer, milk – they’re both liquids; so let’s “diversify horizontally”; straight into the perfect storm that Australian dairy was to become.

What drove the Japanese Post office to spend $6.5 billion buying Paul Little’s Toll logistics group – only to recognise that it had paid at least $4.9billion too much – was similar but different.

JPost was in the process of privatising: it wanted to get dynamic, it wanted to get global. That’s always a dreadfully dangerous mix.

Little certainly wasn’t going to complain when they came knocking on his door. Just as the former shareholders of the dairy companies can thank Kerin for playing Santa.