Dalgety plc

Dalgety plc
(from 1998 PIC International Group)

Type	Public Listed Company
Industry	Wool together with pastoral and agricultural company or and briefly a foods and agricultural conglomerate and since 1998 principally livestock genetics
Fate	PIC retains its own name and a separate identity and continues to display the Dalgety "world" but since 2005 as the major part of animal genetics combine Genus plc
Founded	c.1846 in Melbourne Australia
Founder	Frederick Gonnerman Dalgety
Headquarters	100 George Street W1, previously 65 Leadenhall Street EC3, London, England
Areas served	In its first century: Australia, New Zealand then from the second half of the 20th century all continents. In 2017 "more than 600 breeding herds in about 40 different countries"
Key people	Frederick Gonnerman Dalgety
Products	services to agriculture
Number of employees	16,073 (1992)
Parent	Genus plc
Website	http://na.picgenus.com

Dalgety plc —as Dalgety and Company— was for more than a century a major pastoral and agricultural company or in Australia and New Zealand. Controlled from London it was listed on the and Australasian exchanges.

With the mid-20th century decline of the pastoral sector, particularly where Dalgety held the leading position in the synthetics bedevilled slumping wool trade, new investment was made in different sectors in other countries and Australasian investments sold down until it became a foods and agricultural business of the northern hemisphere.

A successful conglomerate its core businesses were badly damaged by the wholesale slaughter of British beef animals following the discovery mad cow disease did move from cattle to humans. In 1996 and 1997 Dalgety sold 75 per cent of its whole business leaving its principal investment in animal (porcine) biotechnology. Renamed PIC International after its own biotech subsidiary it merged in 2005 with a matching (bovine) business Genus plc for a market valuation in the same league as Dalgety had attained in the 1990s.

Until the second half of the 20th century when it moved operations to the Northern Hemisphere and transformed itself into a conglomerate the major portion of Dalgety's business was the Australasian wool trade pioneered by John Macarthur in New South Wales. Dalgety depended on the woolgrowers. Soon after F G Dalgety went into business on his own account Australia's sheep numbers had reached around 20 million. Thirty years later there were more than 100 million but by 1903 by prolonged drought flocks had almost halved and numbers did not come back to 100 million until 1926. By that time UK took about 50 per cent of Australia's total wool exports. UK demand rose during the Second World War but as the war ended it was found the UK government held 10.4 million bales. In conjunction with officials from Australia New Zealand and South Africa a joint arrangement was made in 1945 to ensure its orderly sale and the sale was completed in 1951. Later the same year American demand generated by the outbreak of the Korean War pulled wool prices up to nine times the UK contract price of five years earlier but the following year Australia's returns from wool were halved.

Wool prices continued to fall but bottomed in 1971 when there were a record 180 million sheep, the sheep numbers to some extent compensating for low wool prices. Price stabilisation schemes were organised with Australian government support. That support was withdrawn in 1999.