The Korean conglomerate has made the news plenty of times before and not always in a positive light. Now it wants Australia’s largest defence group.
Kim Seung-youn made his first public appearance in five years on Monday, when the Hanwha chairman toured an aerospace lab in Daejeon and watched his employees play baseball. One day later, the conglomerate controlled by his billionaire family was in the news for a different reason – a $1 billion takeover bid for Australia’s Austal.
Back as chairman of Hanwha, Kim has directed a massive expansion of the company into defence and aerospace businesses. Last year it launched its latest subsidiary, Hanwha Ocean, renaming the recently acquired Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering. That business is the world’s second-largest shipbuilder and had been run by the state-run Korea Development Bank after its parent, Daewoo, collapsed into bankruptcy.
And in November, Marles and Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy went even further to support Austal. The company, they said, would become the federal government’s monopoly shipbuilder in Western Australia, guaranteeing it a pipeline of navy contracts for smaller warships as part of the rationalisation of shipyards in Henderson, a suburb in Perth’s south.
These issues, and a history of poor financial performance, have meant Austal has long traded at a discount to US-listed shipbuilders including Huntington Ingalls, General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin. It was only with the disclosure that it had appointed JPMorgan and Poynton Stavrianou to deal with interest from suitors, first revealed by
JF Lehman has some $US4 billion in assets under management and is focused on aerospace, defence and maritime sectors. It was part of a consortium alongside Apollo Global Management and Hill City Capital that acquired Atlas Air Worldwide, one of the largest providers of outsourced aircraft and aviation operating services, in a deal worth about $3 billion.
That puts him on the other side of the wall to Christopher Pyne, his one-time cabinet colleague and a former defence minister who has since started an advisory of his own, Pyne & Partners.
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