Australian OneFortyOne Plantations (OFO) has signed an agreement to acquire one of New Zealand’s leading forestry businesses, Nelson Forests.

Nelson Forests is currently 100% owned by investment funds advised by Global Forest Partners LP, a US-based timberland investment management organisation.

The acquisition will allow for the exchange of best practice forestry management between the Australian and New Zealand operations. Following the acquisition of Nelson Forests, OFO intends to pursue options to increase the scale of both the forest and domestic processing activities in the Nelson region.

Completion of the transaction is expected to occur during 2018, subject to approval from New Zealand’s Overseas Investment Office (OIO). Campbell Global, Gresham Partners and MinterEllisonRuddWatts were advisory partners to OFO on the transaction.

Nelson Forests is a vertically integrated plantation and mill business that operates in the Nelson/Marlborough region of New Zealand. The plantation is over 60,000 productive hectares in size and the region has a total annual log processing capacity of 1.4 million cubic metres.

OFO is a leader in the Australian forestry industry. It holds long-term harvesting rights to a softwood plantation estate in the Green Triangle region comprising over 80,000 hectares.