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Thursday, 5 April 2007

No stopping the Millionaire Factory’s global domination

Stephen Mayne writes:

Macquarie Bank might be flying into a stiff headwind over Qantas and suffering the ignominy of missing out on the $13 billion Alinta chase, but the rise and rise of the Millionaire Factory continues at a staggering pace nonetheless.

Take the past 48 hours as an example with these three new deals were unveiled to the market:

  • Macquarie and PBL buy nine Canadian casinos for $1.45 billion in a 50-50 joint venture.
  • A 58% owned subsidiary of Macquarie Communications Infrastructure Group (MCIG), which in turn is 19% owned by the bank, splurges $6.07 billion buying National Grid’s British mobile phone, television towers and digital TV spectrum.
  • Macquarie Bank to take a 5-15% stake in Coles supermarkets business as part of Wesfarmers consortium.

The casino announcement talks about Macquarie Bank controlling $176 billion in assets world wide, but with another $6.2 billion stacked on in the UK yesterday, the empire will soon surely exceed $200 billion.

Macquarie paid $93 million for a 17% stake in Boart last September, yet just six months later the Millionaire Factory got the float away raising a staggering $2.35 billion. Macquarie has retained a 2% stake worth $47 million and walked away with a quickfire profit of about $350 million. Thanks for coming.

As usual, they’ve pushed the envelope on pricing and left nothing on the table for the aftermarket. I was stupid enough to buy the usual $500 worth of Boart share at $1.875 this morning, but they quickly fell below the $1.85 float price to a low of $1.825 as about 100 million share changed hands in the first hour of trade.

The major institutional shareholders revealed this morning — HSBC, St George Bank, Suncorp and UBS — can’t be too happy about that. Sounds like another Dyno-Nobel.

Still, you’ve to hand it to them. A deal flow of billions by the day must be an extraordinary juggling act.

Let’s hope they all have a good rest over Easter because corporate Australia has never seen anything like this before and it’s generating truckloads of wealth for the nation.