Newly filed financials documents have shown that Greek Australian billionaire Dennis Bastas’s pharmacy and cosmetics empire recorded a near eightfold increase in net profits, though no dividends have been received by the businessman.
Bastas, who is chairman and chief executive of DBG, oversaw an impressive rise in the past year across the various sectors of his business empire, with DBG Health climbing to a $7 billion valuation in August after he sold a quarter stake to a private capital fund run by BDT & MSD Partners.
The Greek Australian received no dividend, though the sale netted him $1.6 billion, as reported in Australian Financial Review.
Bastas’s personal wealth is now estimated at over $5 billion according to the Financial Review Rich List.
DBH Health owns the country’s largest generic drug manufacturer, Arrotex, which makes about a third of the medicines dispensed under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme every year, and has expanded into the consumer beauty market over the past three years.
The manufacturer’s beauty market items sell at Woolworths, as well as overseas at Target and Kroger stores in the United States, and in the Superdrug chain in the United Kingdom.
DBG Health’s high rise in sales ($1.96 billion this year compared to $1.39 billion the previous year ) along with its profits (up to $411.7 million from $52.7 the previous year) and its deals have led to its high valuation, but no dividend was declared to Bastas or DBG Health’s parent company, DBG Global Investments.
DBG Global Investments received a dividend of $26.6 million in the prior year.
Bastas declined to comment on Monday to AFR but has previously flagged plans for an ASX listing.
“It is certainly a company that is suited to be a public company at some point,” Bastas said in an interview at the time of the sale.
“The breadth of our portfolio, the fact that we’re Australia’s largest pharmaceutical business, run by Australian owners for Australia, will make this the kind of company that should be in the hands of Australian investors.”
