The Irish Times Business Person of the Month<\/a> for October when the news of the deal broke.<\/p>\nDawn Meats completed the deal with Alliance in December that saw the Waterford group agree to pay 270 million New Zealand dollars (\u20ac132 million at the time) for a 65 per cent shareholding.<\/p>\n
Farmer-shareholders, who retain a 35 per cent stake in the business, also stood to benefit from a distribution of up to NZ$20 million in the initial financial year and up to NZ$20 million in the next financial year.<\/p>\n
Just weeks after the deal, Alliance Group\u2019s chief executive Willie Wiese stepped down with Browne taking up the mantle on an interim basis in addition to his position as chief executive of Dawn.<\/p>\n
Speaking to The Irish Times at the time of the shareholder approval, Browne said that while the appetite for red meat was on the rise globally, there were limited opportunities to secure supplies to satisfy that demand.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor a company like Dawn, which has grown to the size it has in Ireland and Britain, there is not much more we can grow in those jurisdictions,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
A graduate of the University of Limerick where he studied marketing and agribusiness, Browne joined the meat business on a graduate management programme before rising through the ranks. He was appointed chief executive in 2007, aged 34.<\/p>\n
Rounding out the year, Dawn Meats won the award of the World\u2019s Best Steak alongside Lidl for its grass fed Angus sirloin. The steak is sold by Lidl in Ireland and comes from cattle bred in Co Waterford.<\/p>\n
Dawn is a family-owned business which was founded in 1980, with more than 8,000 employees and exports to more than 50 countries. Its annual turnover is in excess of \u20ac3 billion, and operates under the Dunbia brand in the UK.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Niall Browne, the chief executive of Dawn Meats, has been chosen as The Irish Times Business Person of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":308263,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[7863,72,144852,82077,61,60],"class_list":["post-308262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-bank-of-ireland","tag-business","tag-businessperson-awards","tag-dawn-meats","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=308262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308262\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/308263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=308262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=308262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=308262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}