KEY POINTS:
You could hear the wheels turning and bankers rubbing their hands this year as firms got snapped up left, right and centre.
It was also the year when private equity firms - largely from Australia - emerged as major dealmakers.
"It was the continuation of the sale of
New Zealand Inc," Macquarie Equities investment director Arthur Lim said of this year.
It began with the sale of New Zealand's favourite online auctioneer, Trade Me, to Australian media firm Fairfax.
Trade Me was sold for a boggling $700 million, netting its young founder Sam Morgan more than $220 million.
Later Fairfax noted that Trade Me had been money well spent, as media companies redirect their focus towards internet advertising.
Trade Me's sale was met with a collective "good on ya, mate" attitude. But sentiment was not quite so positive for the "merger" of Waste Management with Australia's Transpacific Industries, for $870 million.
The plan provoked much debate about the legitimacy of amalgamations which in effect were takeovers but needed only 75 per cent shareholder approval compared with the usual 90 per cent.
Another "takeover in drag," a merger between Contact Energy and its 51 per cent Australian shareholder Origin, was abandoned in June due to lack of shareholder support.
And a failed $1.8 billion bid by Warehouse founder Stephen Tindall and a private equity firm to take his company private again raised the hackles of shareholder groups because it too would have been a "scheme of arrangement".
The plan was scuppered by Australian supermarket giant Woolworths, which bought a 10 per cent blocking stake alongside its New Zealand rival Foodstuffs and, at last look, continued to fuel gossip of a full takeover of the "Red Sheds".
In one of the year's biggest deals of the year, private equity firms bought Independent Liquor, outbidding brewers, the apparent natural owners.
Australia's Private Equity Partners and CCMP reportedly paid $1.3 billion - $200 million more than Lion Nathan or DB Group were prepared to fork out.
Another company to get snapped by Australians this year was the 102-year-old health food supplements Healtheries business by private equity firm Next Capital.
Next also dipped its toes into Hirepool, taking an 80 per cent stake in July with the balance held by management and a management-related firm.
Australian private equity firm Crescent Capital Partners took a 60 per cent slice of Hawkes Bay juice company Simply Squeezed in August.
And in September Australia's Quadrant Private Equity joined forces with investment bank Goldman Sachs JBWere to buy Jan Cameron's remaining 49 per cent of her outdoor clothes firm Kathmandu Group.
She sold them 51 per cent in April for $276 million. In the same month, Queensland travel company S8 gobbled up New Zealand travel firm Gullivers Travel for $235 million.
This month private equity firm Ironbridge Capital snatched the country's second-largest rubbish collection and disposal company, EnviroWaste, from Christchurch-based Fulton Hogan for a reported $365 million.
"New Zealand is rapidly becoming an economic colony of Australia, mainly because our neighbour has a huge pool of funds to buy our companies and we have limited funds to defend them," analyst Brian Gaynor said this year.
He noted that as the local market capitalisation was less than $60 billion, Australian investors could buy this market 40 times with the new funds on tap by 2015.
But it wasn't just Australian firms making a play for New Zealand companies.
International spirits firm Bacardi ventured into the New Zealand market when it mounted a $138 million takeover offer for vodka firm 42 Below.
Another company with smart marketing - boutique coffee house Caffe L'affare - was sold to Japanese-owned food group Cerebos Gregg's for an estimated $25 million.
Hell Pizza was snapped up for a reported $15 million by the local owners of the Burger King franchise, TPF Group.
Dutch company Cavotec caught everyone by surprise when it announced a reverse takeover bid of NZAX-listed Mooring Systems, valued at $43.7 million.
Ongoing rumours of takeover have also spurred share price rises for a number of companies this year, including casino operator SkyCity and building materials firm Fletcher Building.
But perhaps the most interesting stories were the deals that didn't occur or still might happen.
Air New Zealand was disappointed when in November it finally gave away its bid for a transtasman code share agreement with Qantas after getting a negative draft ruling from Australian regulators.
But CanWest Mediaworks looks ripe for the picking. Media ownership changes in Australia have prompted its Canadian majority shareholder to review its Australasian interests.
Telecom was also taking a hard look at its assets. In October Australian media reported that it had opened talks with a number of junior telcos in Australia on the sale of its struggling Australian arm AAPT.
The next month Telecom confirmed it would sell its Yellow Pages directories, with internet search engines the likely buyers, for what analysts estimated could be $1.5 billion.
A mooted merger between eftpos companies Provenco and Cadmus was squashed by the companies involved, and the ports of Auckland and Tauranga were talking seriously of joining forces.
Meanwhile, New Zealand's king dealmaker, Graeme Hart, had a big year. In November he privatised Australian food company Burns Philp for an estimated $1.5 billion.
In March, he sealed the $3.4 billion takeover of forest products company Carter Holt Harvey - the country's largest takeover deal - and began selling off the company's forests.
He also sold Burns Philp's Uncle Tobys snack food business to Nestle for $1.04 billion, and in December got $245 million for the sale of its New Zealand Bluebird snack business to PepsiCo NZ.
He also bought International Paper's drinks packaging division for just over $700 million and entered a takeover battle for Swiss company SIG.
- NZPA
