Manufacturer to cover more ground with £20m Australian deal
FLOORING group Victoria has laid down £20m cash to buy an Australian manufacturer.
Dunlop Flooring, which has operations in Sydney and Melbourne, has been bought from Pacific Brands. The management team is staying with the business, which Victoria said “will continue to operate with a significant degree of autonomy”.
The enlarged group now has 1,800 employees and operates from 10 sites in the UK, and five in Australia.
Victoria’s chairman Geoff Wilding described the Dunlop acquisition as “important”, with it diversifying the group’s exposure as nearly 30% of its earnings will come from Australia once the deal is completed in the first quarter of 2017.
The deal comes 16 months after Victoria bought Quest Carpets in Melboune, which the company said is now “contributing materially to our outstanding performance in the Australian market”.
Mr Wilding said: “Shareholders will recall that Victoria acquired UK underlay manufacturer, Interfloor, in September 2015 and we have been highly effective in improving earnings over the last 12 months. We anticipate a similar outcome with Dunlop.
“Our strategy of achieving scale through acquisitions and using that scale to extract genuine synergies continues to deliver value for the Group and we look forward to developing the Dunlop business as part of Victoria.”
