Lendlease’s decision to cut and run from its $4 billion international construction and development business last month was dramatic. But not as dramatic as Intrepid Mine’s experience in 2012, when its Indonesian partner suddenly seized its Tujuh Bukit gold project and transferred its ownership.
It is right alongside Wesfarmers’ bungled attempt to crack the United Kingdom with a $705 million acquisition of Homebase, which it hoped would become a British Bunnings. The Perth conglomerate’s then-chairman, Michael Chaney, even admitted that the company had erred – after it wore $1.7 billion in losses and left two years in – by assuming its own executives knew all that was needed to make it a success.
“It is almost like a collective guilt thing you have going here. I just don’t buy into it. People tell me that Boral has had problems in the past in the deployment of capital. I will ask them, ‘tell me where I have made a mistake in allocation over the past six years and I will own it. I will own any mistake.
East 72 Holdings’ Andrew Brown says the Orora deal was notable because the market scepticism was there from the start. He says the group looks to have fallen into a trap of buying another company rather than backing its own products.“The hits is Catapult, which sells athletic monitoring systems. This week, the company signed the Brazilian Football Confederation.“Big M&A more often than not is a spectacular failure,” he says. “It doesn’t follow geographical divides, it’s big M&A ...