Wellard Rural Exports

INTRODUCTION

Wellard Ltd. (“Wellard”) is a world leader in the production and distribution of livestock and grain. Wellard Rural Exports is the largest live cattle exporter and ship owner in Australia. For more than 30 years, Wellard Rural Exports has been servicing markets globally through its vertically integrated supply chain. Wellard owns a fleet of custom built livestock carrying vessels and land assets in Australia which facilitate the livestock export process. Wellard is an ASX listed company with an annual group turnover of approximately AUD550 million.

THE SITUATION

In order to manage a number of different strategic transactions, Wellard was looking for a technology provider in order to ensure the M&A due diligence process ran smoothly. The solution needed to be both secure and easy to use, in order to present and exchange its most confidential information.

On a recent transaction, Wellard had multiple users accessing the virtual data room via a host of advisors, accountants, lawyers and bankers. There was heavy traffic throughout the 6 month process, and the team needed a secure solution they could trust for data integrity and availability of information that would be easy to find and store.

THE SOLUTION

After working with Intralinks for M&A transactions and a capital raising for their Initial Public Offering, Wellard found Intralinks enabled numerous users from different backgrounds to access the data without any issues in terms of security, speed or reliability, facilitating a smooth transaction. “I think one of the main advantages was that it didn’t require a great deal of training. It was quite user-friendly. It was very easy to pick up and we didn’t have to spend a lot of time up-skilling staff, or advisors for that matter, on how to use the product. It was so user friendly,” said George Nichols, Group Financial Controller, Wellard Group Holdings.

THE BENEFITS

Due to the user-friendly nature of Intralinks, Wellard is able to stay laser focused on the deal at hand without having any technical issues in the background. Wellard found using Intralinks facilitates a far easier M&A deal process which has saved both time resources and cost. Working with a product with the strength of reputation of Intralinks meant that all users were very quickly navigating around the virtual data room to locate documents, ask questions or run reports. George Nichols continued, “Another reason why we chose Intralinks was because behind the technology there’s dedicated team that was with us every step of the way through the process.”