Red Rooster owner Craveable Brands' management is in front of potential investors on Tuesday, as it ramps up plans for a $200 million-plus initial public offering. 

Craveable Brands' team headed by chief executive officer Brett Houdin kick off its management roadshow in Brisbane on Tuesday, where it will address Morgans' retail broker network. 

It is understood Morgans lines up as a co-lead manager on the fast food company's float, joining lead managers Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley in the Craveable Brands tent. 

Houdin and his team are expected to meet institutional investors in Sydney and Melbourne later this week. 

The meetings come as Craveable Brands owner Archer Capital prepares the company for a sharemarket listing, expected early next month.  

The company is the rebadged Quick Service Restaurant Holdings and master franchisor of Red Rooster, Oporto and Chicken Treat fast food restaurants.

Craveable Brands is forecast to make $52.5 million in earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation in the 2018 financial year, up from $46.4 million in the year to June 2017. 

The management roadshow only one week after brokers Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley launched the formal IPO marketing with the release of detailed analyst reports to fund managers. 

The float's pricing and size is yet to be determined. 

 

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Bellamy's Australia is set to embark on a rights issue to fund the acquisition of a new canning factory. 

Credit Suisse is overseeing the rights issue. 

The company's shares went into a trading halt on Tuesday morning ahead of the offer. 

Bellamy's has been in the market for a new organic infant formula packing and canning facility, after its existing partner Bega Cheese sold its Tatura Milk canning plant to American Mead Johnson. 

It's previously been linked to Melbourne-based Blend and Pack, which has a China accredited processing and packaging plant. 

The acquisition and raising comes after a shake-up at Bellamy's, which has seen Janchor Partners' John Ho join the board and Andrew Cohen take over as chief executive officer. 

The infant formula company's shares have stabilised around the $5 mark in recent weeks, however that is still well off the $12-plus mark where it was as recently as late last year. 

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Specialist Chinese M&A firm Vermilion Partners advised CSL on its $US352 million ($467 million) investment in China. 

CSL announced on Tuesday morning that it was taking an 80 per cent stake in Wuhan Zhong Yuan Rui De Biologics (Ruide) in China for $US352 million. 

It's understood Vermilion advised CSL on the deal. The firm specialises in cross border and domestic investment banking in China, among other regions, with offices and three Chinese cities. 

CSL said the acquisition would be funded with existing debt, and would proceed with its already announced share buyback. 

The company told shareholders that Ruide would boost CSL's strategic presence in China. 

CSL will take the stake from Humanwell Healthcare Group Co - the same company which recently purchased Ansell's condoms business. 

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Listed property funds manager Charter Hall Group is in early stage talks to buy Westpac Banking Corp's infrastructure investment arm, Hastings Funds Management. 

Street Talk understands Charter Hall, Westpac and Hastings have held a number of rounds of "soft" talks as they explore a potential transaction, and the discussions will heat up again this week with management presentations at Hastings' Melbourne headquarters. 

Sources said all three sides of the potential deal - Charter Hall, Westpac and Hastings - were happy to progress talks only slowly, with negotiations centred around the right cultural fit and relationships, rather than how much Westpac would receive for its infrastructure manager. 

Charter Hall has investment bank Lazard in its corner. 

Westpac put Hastings up for sale almost 18-months ago, hiring Berkshire to run a fairly standard two-part auction which attracted interest from offshore heavyweights including MassMutual Financial Group and TIAA-CREF. 

The auction failed to turn up an acceptable bid and only caused some instability at Hastings, which was said to leave some of its clients unimpressed. 

This time, Westpac is believed to be much more targeted in its approach and seeking to keep both Hastings management and clients on board.

Charter Hall, meanwhile, is said to view Hastings as one way to advance its own offering as a manager of "real assets". Plenty of its competitors in the real estate funds management sector, such as QIC Ltd and AMP Capital, have large infrastructure investment teams which complement the real estate platforms. 

Buying Hastings would also mirror a move by one of the world's largest real estate investment managers, CBRE Global Investors, which agreed to acquire Toronto-based infrastructure manager Caledon Capital Management late last week. 

Charter Hall is expected to pitch itself as an experienced custodian of institutional and superannuation funds' money. The company had $19 billion in funds under management as at December 31. 

It would also be familiar name for plenty of Hastings' investors. Hastings is an Australian-based global infrastructure asset owner, with $12.8 billion in funds under management as at the end of last year.

Its assets include stakes in the Port of Newcastle, NSW electricity transmission company TransGrid, Perth Airport and South East Water in the United Kingdom, which it owns on behalf of Australian and offshore clients. 

For Westpac, the talks come as it re-considers its investment in fund managers. The company sold the bulk of its stake in equities manager BT Investment Management last month and is also seeking to sell Ascalon, which owns stakes in five asset managers. 

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Glencore's $US2.55 billion bid for Rio Tinto's Hunter Valley assets has turned the spotlight on which assets the Swiss miner might have to sell to keep its debt under control.

The Tahmoor coking coal mine in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales could be one of the first to go, with Standard Chartered Bank mandated by Glencore to run a sale process.

Prospective acquirers have been asked to sign confidentiality agreements with an information memorandum set to land in the coming weeks.

According to a sale flier obtained by Street Talk, Tahmoor is an "established and well understood underground longwall mining operation" which offers a "large JORC resource with the current mine plan to extend beyond 2030."

The auction also includes Tahmoor's share in Port Kembla with potential buyers to get right of access to its coal export terminal. Glencore owns the Tahmoor assets in their entirety

South32 would be a logical suitor for Tahmoor, which produced 2 million tonnes of hard coking coal in fiscal 2016 plus 45,000 tonnes of thermal coal, given the proximity of its Illawarra coal assets.

Glencore's sale flier for Tahmoor talks up the potential to mine the Wongawilli seam within the existing Tahmoor tenements, and the potential to achieve "blending synergies" by combining coking coals from the Wongawilli seam with the nearby Bulli seam.

South32 mines the bulli seam at its Appin operations, which are just a few short kilometres to the north east of Tahmoor.

South32 has been acquisitive for coal in recent times, but had to abandon its bid to buy Peabody's Metropolitan mine in April after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) raised concerns that South32's increased dominance in the region could have led to increased coal prices for BlueScope Steel.

Tahmoor could also be an attractive option for Korean steel giant POSCO, which is planning to build its new greenfields Hume Coal coking coal mine 46 kilometres south of Tahmoor near Berrima.

With community activists fiercely opposing Hume Coal, POSCO may well find Tahmoor to be a simpler, cheaper and quicker option.

With Glencore's focus on thermal coal, it is also expected the Swiss miner may seek to liquidate some of its lesser coking coal mines in Queensland, including the Newlands and Collinsville mines, which were either struggling or closed prior to the rally in coking coal prices last year.

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