Why Marcus Blackmore supports $1.85bn takeover of the company that bears his family’s name

Marcus Blackmore says the Japanese brewing giant has a longer-term vision for the company that his father Maurice founded in the 1930s.

Marcus Blackmore says ownership the brand has never been a priority for the family. Picture: John Feder

Marcus Blackmore has already seen the vitamins company that bears his family’s name sold twice before.

The first time was when Mr Blackmore – now aged 78 – was a teenager. His father, Maurice, sold most of the company to its biggest customers in what Mr Blackmore likened to a co-operative business model.

The second time was in 1985 when the company listed on the ASX. Now it looks likely to change hands a third time after Japanese brewing giant Kirin lobbed a $1.85bn takeover bid as part of its push deeper into pharmaceuticals and health sciences.

On Thursday, Mr Blackmore sold his 18 per cent stake in the company to Kirin for $335m.

He isn’t fazed about his name disappearing from the shareholder register.

“The Blackmore family never owned more than 45 per cent of the business. So ownership was not a priority,” he said on Thursday.

“My father’s focus in life was delivering to people an opportunity to address their health issues with natural treatments and supplements, and so on.”

To this end, he is confident that Kirin will be a “good custodian” of the Blackmores brand. He has spent a fair bit of time with the Japanese executives and their vision for the company has impressed him.

“They’ve shared with me their long-term plan, that’s what happens with Japanese companies,” he said.

“They take a longer-term view about things, certainly more than private equity.”

The feeling is mutual. Kirin has offered him an advisory role in an apparent sign of respect – something that Mr Blackmore feels has been lost in recent years.

He has been effectively estranged from the company during the past two years and has used the might of his shareholding to wage a high-profile feud against former chair Anne Templeman-Jones.

“I haven’t been welcomed in the company for the last two years. They just don’t communicate with shareholders; I don’t know how they treat them but it’s not appropriate – certainly not like we’ve treated our shareholders in the past.

“We always kept them informed about what’s going on. Even the last announcement from the company, all it talked about was financial issues. And I challenged the board and they said ‘well it’s normal just to have financial issues in the six monthly of your report’. That’s rubbish.”

Mr Blackmores’s dispute with Ms Templeman-Jones was one of the most fierce to grip Australian boardrooms in recent years. Mr Blackmore used his shareholding to vote against her re-election at the company’s annual meeting in late 2021.

In the campaign leading up to the AGM, Ms Templeman-Jones accused Mr Blackmore of disrespectful behaviour before he stood down from the board of Blackmores in October 2020.

Mr Blackmore dismissed the allegation at the time, saying he had been “vilified”.

Ms Templeman-Jones narrowly survived Mr Blackmore’s bid to unseat her, receiving 58 per cent of the shareholder vote. But she resigned a year later.

The relationship between Mr Blackmore and Blackmores’ board has since thawed. He said the company’s current chair, Wendy Stops, had told him he can “talk to anybody” at the company.

“There was a significant change in terms of the leadership of the board,” Mr Blackmore said.

So why is he supporting Kirin’s bid? It’s a question of legacy.

“I’ve gifted something in the order of $15m to two universities to set up – in the case of Southern Cross University, a naturopathic medicine centre – and that’s going really well,” he said.

“And in the case of Western Sydney University, the National Institute of Complementary Medicine.

“Why would I do that? There’s no immediate financial return to me but it’s all a part of that legacy that my father left me with on his deathbed. He said ‘son, the sad thing about my life is that I haven’t seen naturopathy as a true professional’.

“And so I’ve taken that up. It’s just so it’s not Marcus Blackmore just running off and cashing the chips.”