Australia: Last year was a good one for Cooper Brewery’s shareholders

The past year was a good one for those affiliated with the Cooper family and their beer business started by Thomas Cooper in 1862, with the tight-knit grouping of Coopers Brewery shareholders reaping over A$13 million in dividends, The Australian reported on January 20.

Coopers Brewery’s tiny shareholder base — numbering less than 150 investors, of whom 90 per cent are linked via birth or marriage to the brewer’s founder — has received a strong flow of dividend payments from stakes in the nation’s biggest independent brewery.

Coopers shareholders pocketed an average of about A$91,500 each for 2015, spread over two dividend payments.

The brewer’s board, dominated by members of the Cooper family, paid A$6 interim and A$6 final dividends to shareholders, totalling A$13.725 mln.

The payout equalled the A$6 interim and A$6 final dividends handed out in 2014 and comes as the South Australian brewer battled a 40-year, industry-wide ­decline in beer consumption.

Nonetheless, late last year Coopers Brewery, which accounts for about 5 per cent of the national beer market, announced that its total beer sales for 2014-15 had increased 4.7 per cent to 78.8 million litres, the 22nd consecutive year of growth. That increase helped the business’s revenue rise to A$235.1 mln, up from A$231.3 mln in 2013-14.

For fiscal 2015, Cooper’s net profit rose 3.2 per cent to A$28.9 mln, up from A$28 mln the previous year.

It was a different story in 2013 when Coopers paid out A$14.6 mln in dividends — that payout was boosted by a special dividend of A$1.733 mln to celebrate the brewery’s 150th anniversary, the biggest payout in the company’s history.

Still tightly held by the Cooper family, Coopers Brewery has four classes of shares that reflect its complex and quirky shareholder base, archaic company constitution and the marriages of the company’s founder, Thomas Cooper.

Mr Cooper had two wives, with the descendants from both awarded different classes of shares. Coopers Brewery share capital base includes class A shares that are solely owned by family members descended from Mr Cooper’s first wife, Anne, with class B shares owned solely by descendants of Mr Cooper’s second wife, Sarah.

A dominating pool of class C shares, which make up more than 95 per cent of all shares on issue, can be bought and sold by both branches of the family, while a final tranche of class D shares is a legacy of decades old corporate manoeuvres and takeover battles.

Since 2011, Coopers Brewery has paid out about A$65 mln in franked dividend payments, an average of just under A$435,000 for each investor.

20 January, 2016