This content is produced by The Australian Financial Review in commercial partnership with KPMG.
There is often a discussion around the nation's Baby Boomer generation and the massive transfer of business wealth coming up as many business founders retire.
In the M&A; sector the focus is on mid-market family companies where ageing founders are supposedly looking for an exit through a trade sale or a private equity buyout rather than an IPO.
KPMG deal advisory partner Peter Turner suggests the great transfer has not yet come even though we have been talking about it for a few years. Turner says older owners often just find a different solution to selling such as bringing in a management team so they can continue to hold the business while it manages itself.
Turner says there was a wave of exits just after the GFC but it has been pretty stable since.
Moreover, it would seem a lot of owners that did sell at the time have suffered from a little remorse.
As KPMG's local deal advisory head David Heathcote commented at a recent Deal Market Outlook roundtable co-hosted by The Australian Financial Review and the professional services firm, he has seen cases where 100-year-old companies have been sold and the cashed-up former owner has reinvested in the share market or in fixed-income products but has also asked "what's next?"
"Owners complain it's not very engaging and they don't feel as though they've really got a purpose. Moreover, they're getting the same return as they would be if they were still running the business, even though there might be some challenges in the business."
Yet while there may not be a lot of movement on the Baby Boomer front generally, there could be among farm owners which is a sector probably ripe for some generational change and potentially aggregation with well over 130,000 farms operating nationally.
It is a trend that Meredith Paynter, M&A; specialist and partner at law firm King & Wood Mallesons, can see coming.
"It's just a function of the profile of farm ownership in Australia where the average age of farmers is going up.
"Often, the kids are in the city so they're not interested in taking over the farm. There's also general recognition that a lot of farms are probably not as efficient as they could be if they had scale."
This plays into a broader theme around aggregation of Australian agriculture and corporatisation of farms in Australia. It's one where foreign buyers might be interested as they are looking to buy scale or into scaled industries.