Australia’s Richest Person, Gina Rinehart, To Invest $435M In Dairy Firm That Would Supply Milk Formula To China
Gina Rinehart is Australia's richest person with an estimated wealth of $22 billion. She would likely hold on to that title for a long time not only because she has rightly invested in coal and iron ore which are still the country's top export earners despite the low price of the two commodity in the international market.
Rinehart also has an eye for spotting good business opportunities which is why one of her companies, Hope Dairies, has invested $435 million with an eye to be a supplier of infant milk formula to China, where demand is forecast to grow almost twice its current level in the next three years.
Just the fact that the Asian giant has more than one billion population is enough for any forward-looking entrepreneur like Rinehart to see dollar figures every time she sees a Chinese infant.
The dairy firm plans to buy 5,000 hectares of Queensland farmland and targets to start manufacture of infant milk by the second half of 2016, Bloomberg cited Dave Garcia, a co-investor and director of Hope Dairies. The planned facility would process 150 million litres of milk annually for shipment to China beginning in 2016.
Hope Dairies and the Queensland government signed an agreement on the purchase of farmland on Saturday.
Rinehart said Hope Dairies' investment in Queensland would boost the state's dairy industry that would create jobs and hike anew the dairy processing capacity of the state.
Rinehart's partner in China is a subsidiary of China National Machinery Industry Corp. It makes farming machinery.
With China starting to loosen its decades-long one-child policy, Garcia said, "There's another 50 million mouths probably coming online. There's room for everyone in this right now."