Australia’s road transport industry experienced a corporate level shift last week.
The 28,003,556 shares acquired by Safe Driving Concepts Pty Ltd equates to 8.89 per cent of total shares in Lindsay Australia. At a cost of $0.62 per ordinary on-market share, that equates to a cost of over $17 million.
The move has seen Finemore – through Safe Driving Concepts – become Lindsay’s largest individual shareholder with that 8.89 per cent total.
The goal posts have dramatically shifted for Lindsay Australia at the decision-making level in 2025. In the space of less than two months, previous largest shareholder Soul Patts decreased its stake from 12.06 per cent to 11.06 per cent, then to 9.53 per cent, and then ceased to become a substantial holder in late February.
Although there is currently little to no public indication that there are larger takeover or acquisition machinations at play, the industry, including Ron Finemore, has been here before.
At the turn of the millennium, Australia’s transport sector was in the midst of some serious disruption to the status quo.
Toll Group had evolved from a battler to Australian transport behemoth, while the emergence of the likes of Finemore Holdings and a host of other mid-sized transport companies up and down Australia was shifting the landscape of the competition.
Long-time industry leader Linfox now had some serious competition in what was becoming a saturated and hyper-competitive market.
Through one lens, it was easy to view Finemore Holdings as one of a number of small- to- medium-sized companies that was providing greater competition in Australia’s transport sector, which could only be seen as a good thing for the end consumer. Through another, they could have been seen as a thorn in the side of the big boys and a key disruptor to the industry.
In 2000, the originally floated merger between Finemore and Toll required 90 per cent shareholder approval to be conducted. Finemore and the other company directors held a 13 per cent stake, but there was one crucial roadblock.
Linfox owned a very deliberate 10.1 per cent of the company.
This meant Linfox’s refusal to approve the merger alone would prevent it from happening.
Since 1999, Lindsay Fox had been slowly building his stake in Finemore Holdings, from one per cent up to the magic number of 10.1.
Due to the failure to gain 90 per cent shareholder approval, a Scheme of Arrangement worth $119 million was pursued in order to progress the deal.
Crucially, just 75 per cent shareholder agreement was required in this scenario.
A legal battle between Finemore, Toll Group and Toll executive Paul Little ensued in the fallout of the merger, which quickly regressed from positive acquisition to conflict. After Finemore’s non-compete clause with Toll expired, he stepped back into the transport game.
Although Finemore has been operating in Australia’s transport sector since the 1960s, Ron Finemore Transport as we know it today was only founded through his acquisition of haulage business Lewington’s Transport, and then Smith’s Transport in the mid-2000s.
Lewington’s, at the time of purchase in 2006, had recently been placed into receivership with debts or roughly $15 million.
Now Ron Finemore Transport is, like Finemore Holdings before it, a strong player in the Australian road transport space, and its extensive presence in the country’s regions – especially on the east coast – has aligned it as a rival to many of Lindsay Australia’s rural operations.
Lindsay Australia has itself been recently active on the mergers and acquisitions front, having announced the extension of its south-west Western Australian operations through the bolt-on acquisition of GJ Freight in alignment with the release of its 1HFY25 financial reports.
There is no assumption that Finemore’s acquisition of this significant stake in Lindsay’s is the precursor to a larger takeover attempt of the company by Finemore, or that he has positioned his business to be a blocker of any potential takeover like Linfox before him.
The original struggle between transport giants Toll and Linfox, and the role other large operators like Finemore Holdings had to play, was an intriguing part of Australia’s transport industry throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, and it’s a battle that continues to progress today.
Now, 25 years after Ron Finemore’s role in that initial seismic shift of the landscape, his company is once again right at the coalface of what looms as another interesting and defining chapter for the sector.
Watch this space.
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