Hancock moves to top of the pile

Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting and its subsidiary, Roy Hill Holdings, have moved to the top of the Business News annual ranking of private companies in Western Australia, as their surging revenue put them ahead of building company BGC Australia.

Hancock Prospecting’s total revenue more than doubled last financial year to $4.4 billion, mainly a result of the Roy Hill iron ore mine ramping up production and exports.

Its other big revenue earner is the Hope Downs iron ore project, jointly owned by Rio Tinto.

In addition, Hancock has extensive pastoral interests.

It owns 10 pastoral stations in its own right and has a 67 per cent stake in S Kidman & Co, which owns a dozen stations across the country.

Roy Hill Holdings, which is 70 per cent owned by Hancock but operates separately, has been added to the BNiQ Search Engine listing of private companies for the first time.

The iron ore miner earned total revenue of $2.3 billion last year, and that is likely to be much higher in the current financial year as it sustains production at its nameplate capacity of 55 million tonnes per year.

The Buckeridge family’s BGC has been ranked as the state’s largest private company for most of the past decade, with its revenue peaking at an estimated $3 billion in 2014.

It continues to be a very large business, with operations spanning house and apartment building, mining and construction contracting, and building materials manufacture.

However, its core business has been adversely affected by the sharp slowdown in residential building activity in WA.

BGC’s housing starts have fallen from 5,004 in 2013-14 to 2,436 in 2016-17.

That still makes it the state’s largest house builder, ahead of competitors such as ABN Group (2,184), Ventura Home Group (1,197) and JWH Group (1,012).

ABN Group, which is owned by Dale Alcock after he bought out former partner Gary Brown-Neaves, is ranked at number six on the BNiQ list of private companies, with revenue just above $1 billion last financial year.

The list of private companies includes several large businesses owned by private equity investors.

These include oil and gas producer Quadrant Energy, with annual revenue of $996 million.

Quadrant’s owners, including Macquarie Capital, Brookfield Asset Management, Wesfarmers and Angela Bennett’s AMB Holdings, have been readying the business for either an ASX listing or trade sale.

Mining contractor Barminco and trucking firm Bis, which also feature on the private companies list, are still in the hands of private equity investors after earlier listing efforts foundered.

Byrnecut, with annual revenue of $979 million, and Barminco, with revenue of $691 million, are the dominant underground mining contractors in WA, with extensive operations interstate and overseas.