INVESTMENT APPROACH
We aspire to build exceptional businesses with sustainable futures.
OUR INVESTMENT CRITERIA
Our investment criteria guide our capital allocation decisions in relation to our existing or new businesses:
Economically attractive and aligned with our sustainability* principles
- Investments should, or have the potential to, generate attractive financial returns and free cash flow.
- Investments should align with our values and contribute to fulfilling our purpose.
Market leadership and market share growth
- We prefer to own businesses that are, or have the potential to be, market leaders.
- Investments in our existing businesses should raise barriers to entry and enhance their market position.
Diversification
- Investments should support a level of diversification in our portfolio to mitigate risk and secure growth through economic cycles.
Additional value
- We endeavour to add value to our portfolio through strategy development and corporate support.
* As measured through environmental, social and governance (‘ESG’) metrics
OUR CAPITAL ALLOCATION PRIORITIES
Our capital allocation priorities, which aim to optimise our returns and protect our balance sheet, are summarised below:
| Priority | Philosophy |
|---|---|
| Debt | Maintain debt at a level that provides balance sheet resilience |
| Maintenance and replacement capex | Maintain our asset base to ensure sustainability of our operations |
| Efficiency and resilience capex | Efficiency improvements and increased resilience to enhance our competitive advantage and ensure continued supply to our customers, despite potential disruptions in the operating environment |
| Capacity expansions, acquisitions, share buy-backs and dividends | Expansion and acquisition opportunities subject to our investment criteria and considered relative to dividends and buy-backs |
OUR PRINCIPLES AND FINANCIAL OBJECTIVES
Business principles
Our divisions follow the below principles to enable the achievement of our financial objectives:
Value-add: We endeavour to develop products and services with high value-add, where practical, to meet and exceed consumer and customers’ needs and expectations.
Operational excellence: We invest in processes, technology, channels to market, backward integration, sustainable business practices
and innovation to deliver high-quality products and/or services at the lowest cost.
Best people: We employ the best people, in the right roles, across the group to instil a culture of excellence and to implement our strategies.
Strategic stakeholder relationships: We nurture strategic stakeholder relationships to support the continuity and resilience of our operations as well as future growth.
These principles enable us to offer our customers fully integrated, fit-for-purpose products and services that are differentiated from our competitors, raise barriers to entry, and protect our revenue and margins
Financial objectives
To deliver on our strategy and purpose, we have the following objectives:
Grow revenue
Enhance margins
Increase earnings
Improve returns
Reduce net debt
We are prioritising the following initiatives to strengthen our business, improve returns, support attractive cash flow generation and reduce debt and position us favourably for future growth.
- Execution of major capital projects, the largest being PG Bison’s MDF expansion
- Consolidation, rationalisation and restructuring of Unitrans to improve the quality of the business and returns
- Ongoing portfolio review to exit low-return and/or strategically misaligned businesses
- No material acquisitions
- Collectively, our divisions will focus on:
- Market share gains and growth into export markets
- Price adjustments to recover raw material and other cost escalations
- Targeted cost reductions
- Curtailment of non-essential capital expenditure and optimising working capital
- Effective utilisation of existing assets, including discontinuation of underperforming activities and disposal of low-return assets