The Fifth Estate has extensive experience in the development of the Australian forestry and forest products processing industries.

Our Principals have high level qualifications in forestry and forest ecology and over 50 years combined industry and consulting experience. This experience covers technical and management functions from seedlings to finished product markets, and we provide advice to clients in the specific areas of plantation development, silviculture, harvest planning, wood flow scheduling, processing and domestic and international markets.

We provide services across all forest products manufacturing sectors including pulp and paper, wood panels, sawn timber, and engineered wood products.

The Fifth Estate provides ongoing advice to a number of major private and public forest industry companies, investment banks, superannuation funds and fund managers involved in the forest industry, and various industry associations and government forestry bodies.

The Fifth Estate specialises in assisting forestry industry clients in major transactions such as mergers and acquisitions.

The Fifth Estate has experience on the buy and sell sides of transactions in Australia, New Zealand and Asia including roles in facilitation, negotiation, forming strategic alliances, and assisting in securing debt and equity funding.

We have acted for either the seller or a bidder in most of the major forest industry and plantation transactions in Australia and New Zealand in the last 10 years. On the buy side, the Fifth Estate specialised in co-ordinating the due diligence process for plantation and forest processing asset acquisitions.

Assisting clients in developing major greenfield investments is a core business of the Fifth Estate and over the last decade we have facilitated over $1 billion in new forest products processing investment. Our advocacy has assisted our clients to:

• achieve desired outcomes through the government regulatory process,
• obtain financial and non-financial government support,
• negotiate and secure key supply contracts, and
• organise debt funding.

We have provided advice and business development assistance to two of the largest and most secure operators in forestry MIS sector in a wide range of activities including technical advice, government relations, contract negotiation, development of markets and investment in downstream processing. We also assist our clients to develop new and innovative forestry investment products.