Main player in online stock auctions outdates the internet

Born in the era of fax machines and floppy disks, Australia’s original digital livestock auction site has come a long way since the ’80s.

Outcross agent Peter Brooker taking live bids from AuctionsPlus and placing them in the auction at the Yea store sale on Friday May 8, 2020. Picture: Dannika Bonser

THE online livestock marketing sector has been dominated by one progressive player for more than three decades.

AuctionsPlus opened its doors 33 years ago as an electronic trading platform well ahead of its time, given there was no internet, no mobile phones, nor on-farm computers.

Established in 1986 by the Australian Meat and Livestock Corporation in conjunction with the University of New England, CALM – Computer Aided Livestock Marketing – began trading on July 1, 1987. During a restructure in 1996, it was purchased by Elders, Landmark and Ruralco and rebranded CALM Services Pty Ltd, finally becoming AuctionsPlus in 2000.

CEO Angus Street said many people still saw the operation as a start-up, despite its exponential growth in recent years and long history.

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“The first sale took place in 1987 and needed 2km of telecoms and a generator for the fax machines,” Mr Street said. “When we did get into the internet era, we had to deal with slow speeds from dial-up, data black spots and creating technology that simply didn’t exist at the time.”

From 2012 to 2019, cattle numbers increased from 263,361 to 412,406 and sheep sold rose from 1,667,303 to 3,365,676. AuctionsPlus transacted product in excess of $854 million over the first three quarters of this financial year – up about 78 per cent on 2018-19 – and expects to pass the $1 billion mark by June 30.

“In April, we saw more than 2.6 million hits to our website and over 6000 new users on our platform for that month alone,” Mr Street said. “We’ve seen exponential growth in turnover during the past few months – a 38 per cent increase in vendors since the beginning of 2019 and similar figure for buyers.”