SML - Synlait Milk Ltd

[FarmerHamilton]

I have perhaps also overlooked smaller holders who have sold down part and of course there may also be staggers wanting out.
It is interesting to compare the sell down of Synlait Milk and Synlait Farms holders. My rough mental arithmetic suggests a sell down in excess of 11% in Synlait Milk but since Synlait Farms arrived on Unlisted in May there have been sales of less than 1% in Farms shares. And Synlait Farms has generally lacked sellers more than buyers. Does this suggest that the original shareholders are happier staying in the farms than the processor and do not have the same confidence on Synlait Milk projections?
Discl. bought Synlait Farms but do not have allocation of Synlait Milk

No doubt a lot of the Synlait Ltd / Farms shareholders are thru and thru classic kiwi dairy farmers who bought into the equity partnership model when Synlait was just 4 or 5 separate large scale irrigated Canterbury dairy farms ( one of them called Robindale was alone milking 3100 cows ). Many of them were diversifying from their own un-irrigated Waikato farms. In a dozen years they have abandoned Fonterra, built $250m worth of stainless steel including the best infant formula plant in the southern hemisphere, a consumer products business selling to all four corners of the globe with three major shareholders from Holland,China & Japan , and now have a stake in a corporate dairy farming venture with 5000ha and 15,000 cows. Huge change and a far cry from their initial investment thesis !! and many will be more comfortable with the farming side of their investment , Synlait Milk has been a huge dollop of cream on the cake ( pun intended ! ) which has been a spectacular success. Many will have sold enough SM to recoup their whole initial investment , and still have a stake in Farms and Milk worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I invested in a single Synlait managed farm in 2003 , and on 23 July at $2.20 for SML and assuming Farms is trading at $1.25 will have sold enough shares in each to have returned 1.5 times my initial stake ( $400,000 ) and our remaining holding combined in both will be worth $690,000. It's been a great ride, with quite a few bumps in the road ( 2008/9 ) but a real fun journey. Hopefully the Synlait Milk story is in its infancy and we will keep a decent slug of those for many years.