Expat billionaire Michael Hintze adds to NSW farming portfolio
Expatriate Australian billionaire Michael Hintze has added another NSW property to his rapidly expanding east coast farming portfolio. It's a $7.12 million 1,640-hectare farm at Young in the southwest region of southern NSW.
The London-based hedge fund founder has amassed one of Australia’s fastest-growing farm portfolios, with acquisitions totalling about 47,100 hectares since 2007. His private pension fund, MHPF, has spent about $127 million on the land and water purchases.
Hintze is the founder and senior investment officer of CQS Management, a London-based hedge fund with assets of $US10.5 billion.
His most recent NSW purchase before this one was a $1.4 million 410-hectare farm at Munderoo in the southeast of the NSW Riverina.
The Hintze portfolio has been accumulated and managed by Richard Taylor, a director of Growth Farms Australia. MHPF has been described as "a newly diversified agricultural force taking shape in eastern Australia" by The Land's agricultural writer, Peter Austin. It now has made 15 acquisitions in NSW and recently added two sugar cane farms in north Queensland, which marked a shift away from its weighting towards the southern NSW mixed farming of wool, prime lambs, cattle and winter cropping.
The latest Young purchase was from Philip Brown’s Equitas Group.
Hintze’s initial Young district purchase was Glaisnock, the 969-hectare rotational cropping enterprise that had the capacity to operate as a mixed agricultural business.
The purchases have been driven by the view that rural land in Australia now represents good value in light of the strong global demand for “soft commodities”. A key strategy of the group has been to aggregate parcels of land where possible to achieve efficiencies of scale and cross-property synergies.
Hintze's buying spree began when he spent $12.5 million for a Breadalbane property in July 2007. Despite his acquisitions Hintze is not likely to join the Australian Farm Journal's top 10 landholders, since other new players, Macquarie Group and the British private equity company Terra Firma Capital Partners, have between them spent $740 million buying vast chunks of northern Australia. Hintze's biggest purchase was the 7,700-hectare grazing property Warrane, west of Armidale, costing $22 million in late 2007.
Hintze's wealth has been estimated by Forbes magazine at $US1.4 billion in early 20111. Rare with his public pronouncements, Hintze has said he was not just looking for capital gain from the properties. He says he seeks solid returns on production.
''I'm not a farmer, but I do the numbers. It's got to make money,'' the hedge fund chief, who spent 12 years at Goldman Sachs in roles such as head of European emerging markets, told the Australian Financial Review last year. Hintze left Sydney in 1980 for Salomon Brothers in New York.
Trained as an engineer, Hintze served in the Australian army and started his firm, CQS, in 1999. It is short for "Convertible and Quantitative Strategies". He is a well-known philanthropist, with beneficiaries including the University of Sydney.