Business Hall of Fame: Mark Waller

Mark Waller, former EBOS Group chief executive. Photo / Supplied

Mark Waller, the man who transformed EBOS Group into a NZX top 50 company, has been inducted into the New Zealand Business Hall of Fame.

Over nearly four decades, Waller saw EBOS Group rise from a small player in the share market turning over around $8 million into a dual-listed company generating more than $7 billion today.

Born in Christchurch in 1953, Waller, upon leaving school, had thought he wanted to be an oceanographer until his father suggested that he may in fact be more commercially minded.

Having taken a gap year working for BNZ in Fiji, Waller returned to Christchurch in agreement with his father.

After six years working in Melbourne, Waller joined EBOS Group initially as chief financial officer in the 1980s, a time when the company was marginally profitable.

After becoming CEO in 1987, Waller sought to scale the business from an SME to a multinational company in order to become viable as a listed company.

Throughout the 1990s, the EBOS Group acquired many businesses that enabled the company's product range to cater to all life stages of the consumer from newborn and infant healthcare, through to aged care products and in 1999 EBOS Healthcare was formed.

The company's growth continued, becoming an NZX Top 50 listed company in 2006, and exceeding $1 billion in revenue for the first time in 2008.

In the past decade alone, EBOS Group has acquired 19. Of particular note is the purchase of privately-owned wholesale pharmaceutical supplier PRNZ in 2007 for $86.3 million, and the acquisition of Symbion in 2013 for $1.1b – a leading Australasian pharmaceutical wholesaler and distributor.

Publicly listed on both the New Zealand and Australian stock exchanges, EBOS Group annually services thousands of customers across Australasia and employs more than 3,200 employees in 52 locations across the region.

Waller stepped down as CEO and managing director of EBOS Group in 2014, remaining on the Board of Directors and becoming EBOS' Independent Chairman in 2015.

Celebrate the 2019 Laureates as they are admitted to the Business Hall of Fame at the annual black-tie gala dinner held at the Cordis, Auckland on August 15. Tickets available online at www.businesshalloffame.co.nz