The Saint James Company is an aggressive and innovative wine production, sales and marketing company, which seeks to acquire the best in New World winemaking, and hence to leverage the executive management team’s experience and relationships to drive organic growth through global sales and marketing platforms. The Company’s current acquisition targets export to more than thirty countries, and Saint James intends to exploit these relationships, as well as new ones, to deliver industry-leading rates of growth, or ‘hyper growth’.

The global wine market has been transformed in the last thirty or so years by the emergence of so-called New World wines, combined with the rapid expansion of consumption of all wines to new markets around the globe. The USA and Australia have led the growth in New World wines, and have also been key to the expansion of wine consumption beyond the Old World wine markets of Europe. More recently, countries such as Chile, South Africa, Argentina and New Zealand have quickly expanded production, while markets in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia have further fueled consumption. At the same time, production and consumption in Europe has slowed or declined.

In many wine-producing countries, supply has expanded more quickly than demand, encouraged in part by readily available credit. At the same time, many winery owners are completing a generation of ownership, and are considering their options going forward. While many will pass operations on to the next generation, others will have noted the large number of winery sales that have taken place in recent years. Finally, the global economic downturn, and the accompanying credit squeeze, has impacted many wineries who invested during the boom years, and many are facing severe financial challenges.

In anticipation of these changes, The Saint James Company has spent much of the last two years identifying acquisition opportunities around the world, and is now in the final stages of negotiating four separate acquisitions in Australia and New Zealand, having signed letters of intent in late 2008. It also signed its first licensing agreement, for Koala Blue, earlier in 2009. Other acquisitions and licensing arrangements are likely to follow.