 | |
| Company type | Public Listed Company |
|---|---|
| Industry | Wool together with pastoral and agricultural company or stock and station agency and briefly a foods and agricultural conglomerate and since 1998 principally livestock genetics |
| Founded | c.1846 in Melbourne Australia |
| Founder | Frederick Gonnerman Dalgety |
| Fate | PIC retains its own name and a separate identity and continues to display the Dalgety "world" but since 2005 as the major part of animal genetics combine Genus plc |
| Headquarters | 100 George Street W1, previously 65 Leadenhall Street EC3, London , England |
Areas served | In its first century: Australia, New Zealand then from the second half of the 20th century all continents. In 2017 "more than 600 breeding herds in about 40 different countries" |
Key people | Frederick Gonnerman Dalgety |
| Products | services to agriculture |
Number of employees | 16,073 (1992) |
| Parent | Genus plc |
| Website | http://na.picgenus.com |
Dalgety plc—as Dalgety and Company—was for more than a century a major pastoral and agricultural company or stock and station agency in Australia and New Zealand. Controlled from London it was listed on the London Stock Exchange and Australasian exchanges.
With the mid-20th century decline of the pastoral sector, particularly where Dalgety held the leading position in the synthetics bedevilled slumping wool trade, new investment was made in different sectors in other countries and Australasian investments sold down until it became a foods and agricultural business of the northern hemisphere.
A successful conglomerate its core businesses were badly damaged by the wholesale slaughter of British beef animals following the discovery mad cow disease did, as suspected, move from cattle to humans. In 1996 and 1997 Dalgety sold 75 per cent of its whole business leaving its principal investment in animal (porcine) biotechnology. Renamed PIC International after its own biotech subsidiary it merged in 2005 with a matching (bovine) business Genus plc for a market valuation in the same league as Dalgety had attained in the 1990s.