Shaun Drummond

Where CFOs and boards are grabbing funding opportunities, it is to refinance with cheaper debt. Photo: Rob Homer

Sixty-three per cent of chief financial officers expect revenue to rise in the next 12 months and say they are happy with the price and availability of debt, so why has confidence plummeted again?

In Deloitte’s quarterly chief financial officer survey, out on Thursday – just like in Merrill Lynch’s annual survey of finance bosses across the region released a couple of weeks ago – there are lots of positives.

Over the next 12 months, 63 per cent of CFO respondents said they expect revenue to climb, 54 per cent think operating cash flows will improve and most agree that the price and availability of debt has rarely been better – from both bank and debt markets. For the first time in more than two years of Deloitte’s surveys of finance bosses, bank debt is the most-attractive form of funding.

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Shaun Drummond

Ruralco finance chief, Andrew Ferguson, resigned on Tuesday after 16 months in the role.

The move follows Ruralco’s withdrawal of its bid for Elders’ rural services business after Elders rejected it on June 18, saying it undervalued the business and carried too much “execution risk”.

After the failed bid, Ruralco announced a joint venture with grain and oilseed marketer CHS, combining it with Ruralco’s Agfarm.

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Shaun Drummond

The drop in value of the $A, low interest rates and banks’ greater focus on business lending has helped inquiries for business credit rebound in the non-mining sector after six months of low growth, according to a quarterly index of credit applications.

Business credit applications, including business loans, trade finance and asset finance inquiries, to credit check agency Veda rose 5.5 per cent in the June quarter from the year-earlier period.

Most of the growth in demand is coming from the non-mining states, where applications climbed 6 per cent in the three months ended June 30, compared with 1.8 per cent growth in those states in the three months ended March 31. In the mining states of WA, Queensland and the Northern Territory, growth was 3.2 per cent.

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Shaun Drummond

Dexter Clarke took over as CFO of Futuris Automotive at the beginning of July Jesse Marlow

Dexter Clarke, the new CFO at Australia’s largest car parts maker, Futuris Automotive, says his finance team has responded to about 1500 questions from bidders for the company. But after many years in finance and business development jobs at the troubled manufacturer, he’s used to tough tasks.

On Thursday, parent company Elders announced it would sell Futuris to US private equity investor Clearlake Capital for $69 million, after putting it up for sale almost a year ago.

Clarke took over from Dennis Grech at the beginning of July after the former finance boss moved on to another manufacturer in Melbourne after close to four years in the job.

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Shaun Drummond

Stockland is undergoing a management overhaul under its new CEO. Photo: Erin Jonasson

Property group Stockland has lured Tiernan O’Rourke from engineering and construction firm Transfield Services to replace Tim Foster as chief financial officer.

BHP Billiton executive Vince Nicoletti, has already been appointed to replace Mr O’Rourke as finance chief as he was due to take over as head of Transfield’s Middle East and Asia division. One of his chief tasks would have included overseeing the closure of the middle eastern business.

A spokesperson for Transfield Services said Mr O’Rourke, who has been finance chief of Transfield since January 2010, “goes with our best wishes”.

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Agnes King

Australia’s corporate reporting oversight body has urged the International Integrated Report Council to build a stronger case to make it more compelling for listed corporations to adopt integrated reporting voluntarily.

In a submission to the IIRC, the Financial Reporting Council said: “To achieve the IIRC’s ambition of market-led adoption, it is critically important that the market accepts integrated reporting will, in fact, deliver on the promise to produce better, rather than more, reporting, or that the business case for [any] additional reporting is compelling.”

Integrated reporting aims to reduce the reporting burden by re-visiting the notion of “materiality”, or what is crucial to a firm’s sustainability. At the same time, it seeks to expand the assets that a company reports on, beyond the financial to include social, environmental and human capital assets. Management of these are often core to sustainability and performance.

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Agnes King

Susan Ferrier from KPMG says ABW gives greater autonomy of how and where people do their work. Photo: Rob Homer

KPMG may dispose of partner and executive offices, following the lead of PwC and law firm Corrs Chambers Westgarth, to reap the cost and pro­ductivity benefits of the latest organ­isational design fad: activity-based working.

“We have four or five locations where leases come up in the next few years so we wanted something we could experiment in, then leverage nationally,” KPMG human resources director Susan Ferrier said.

Activity-based working is a design concept from Europe that has captured the imagination of Australia’s financial services sector. It’s said to make staff more productive, creative and motivated. Plus, companies can fit 10-20 per cent more people in the same building.

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Shaun Drummond

The IASB has allowed the controversial use of ‘other comprehensive income’ under sustained lobbying from European and US companies in order to reduce volatility in profit and loss statements. Photo: Tamara Voninski

Proposals that will form the guiding principles for a raft of changes to accounting rules that have already been made in the wake of the global financial crisis will be released on Thursday evening.

The discussion paper from the International Accounting Standards Board on its new “conceptual framework” will canvass definitions for assets and liabilities; recognition and derecognition of assets and liabilities; measurement; equity; profit or loss and other comprehensive income; and presentation and disclosure.

The project was put on hold to fast-track several major changes to accounting rules after the financial crisis, but it meant changes have been made without a clear basis.

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Ruth Liew

Richard Dziadzio will replace former chief financial officer Chris Fish who left the Australian-listed insurer last month. Photo: Bloomberg

QBE Insurance Group has appointed the former chief financial officer of AXA Financial, ­Richard Dziadzio, as the global insurer’s new US finance chief.

His appointment comes as QBE US boss David Duclos changes his executive line-up. Mr Dziadzio, who has more than 25 years’ experience in the international insurance and finance sectors, will start his new role next month, replacing former chief financial officer Chris Fish, who left the Australian-listed insurer on June 7. The Australian ­Financial Review first reported Mr Fish’s departure in April, when a spokesman confirmed that it was customary for a new chief ­executive to make changes to his leadership team.

“[Mr Dziadzio] will play an important role here in the US, as well as collaboratively with QBE’s other financial teams around the world,” Mr Duclos said in a ­statement.

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Shaun Drummond

Bank of China employee counts yuan in Changzhi, Shanxi province. teve Kelly of ANZ sees the changes as more ‘symbolic’ and part of moving China closer to an open financial market. Photo: Reuters

Getting money out of China should get easier after the country’s central bank issued a raft of new guidance last week.

For the past year, the Chinese government has been conducting “pilots” with about 13 Chinese and foreign companies – including Intel and Samsung and at least one Australian company – allowing them to move foreign currency and lend surplus yuan to company cash pooling centres offshore.

Last week the People’s Bank of China issued guidance formalising these arrangements.

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Shaun Drummond

Widening the nets for users . . . the ATO has decided to replace its proprietary interface with open-source software ebMS 3.0/AS4, which is being widely adopted in Europe. Photo: AP

The Tax Office has moved to encourage more big business to adopt a government-devised scheme to automate lodgement of financial reports, by replacing a proprietary interface with its systems with open-source software.

The so-called Standard Business Reporting regime has long been touted by the Federal Government as a means to reduce the reporting burden on business by allowing company financial reports and tax returns to be machine-readable, removing manual processes and reducing errors by companies and government agencies.

The use of SBR is also now compulsory for transferring member data between superannuation funds under the Superstream reforms.

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Shaun Drummond

‘People are looking, but people are not transacting as much as they were,’ says BOAML’s David Wood. Photo: Erin Jonasson

A survey of chief financial officers released by Bank of America Merrill Lynch this week appears to give investment banks some cheer. But such is the volatility of recent months, the bank acknowledges if it had asked the same questions now, it would receive a very different response.

BOAML commissioned interviews with more than 600 finance chiefs across Asia in April and May. It found a better outlook on revenue and profits than a year earlier and that Australian finance leaders were twice as likely to use surplus cash for acquisitions than the average for their Asian counterparts.

Across the region, on average, 25 per cent said they would use cash to fund organic growth and a further 19 per cent said they would increase cash reserves. Around 57 per cent in Australia still said they would not be doing any M&A this year (the percentage was 63 per cent for the rest of the region).

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New Zealand’s largest company, Fonterra, has hired Lukas Paravicini from Nestle as its new finance chief to replace Jonathan Mason who is retiring after four years as CFO.

Paravicini has worked for Nestle for 22 years, most recently as general manager for professional delivery for Nestle Europe for two years and before that in various senior finance roles.

The move is part of a management overhaul at the world’s biggest milk producer. The company also hired Jaqueline Chow to the new position of global brands and nutrition.

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Shaun Drummond

CFOs in Japan, as well as Taiwan and South Korea, have an even gloomier view of revenue growth than their Aussie counterparts.. Photo: AFP

Australian finance bosses expect revenue to rise in 2013, but are among the least optimistic in Asia about growth for 2013, according to a regional survey.

On average, 71 per cent of 600 finance chiefs interviewed across Asia in April and May expect revenues to be higher this year, but the figure for Australian CFOs was 67 per cent, fourth lowest among 12 countries, with 15 per cent here expecting revenue to reduce compared to 2012.

Australian finance chiefs also had gloomier expectations for the cost of debt, with 41 per cent here expecting it to rise compared to a weighted average of 30 per cent across the region, according to an annual Bank of America Merrill Lynch survey released on Tuesday.

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Shaun Drummond

More big companies are finding it a worthwhile investment to train overseas workers in Australian tax rules, says Jon Dobell. Photo: James Alcock

Large companies are having sophisticated tax work done overseas, global accounting and technology providers said.

Outsourced tax work and other corporate finance teamwork is usually basic and transactional, such as data collection and processing.

But two organisations that help companies outsource work say financial services and energy companies are following US and UK counterparts by moving offshore sophisticated tax work that requires local knowledge.

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