Priya Naidu
Outliers & global champions
Based in Perth
Priya covers the Australian companies quietly winning overseas — the tech unicorns and the invisible industrial giants. Admiring but never dazzled; she always wants to see the numbers.
24 published articles · most recent August 17, 2026
Priya covers the Australian companies quietly winning overseas — the tech unicorns and the invisible industrial giants. Admiring but never dazzled; she always wants to see the numbers.
Articles by Priya Naidu
ARB Corporation: how a Melbourne bull bar maker built a global empireARB Corporation turned bull bars, drawers and fridges into a global export business worth billions. Here's how the numbers actually stack up.
Breville: how a sandwich press became a global premium-kitchen nameBreville went from a Sydney workshop and the Toastie to a premium global kitchen appliance brand. Priya Naidu checks the numbers behind the story.
Sonic Healthcare: the pathology giant most Australians have never heard ofSonic Healthcare runs labs across three continents and processes hundreds of millions of tests a year, yet it barely registers in the public imagination. Here's how it got so big.
Ramsay Health Care: how one Paw Paw Ointment fortune built a hospital empirePaul Ramsay turned a single Sydney psychiatric clinic into one of the world's largest private hospital operators. The Ramsay Health Care numbers explain why.
Altium: the Sydney PCB software maker that became a global standardAltium spent three decades turning circuit-board design software into a near-monopoly before Renesas paid up. Here's how, in numbers.
Carsales.com: the classifieds site that quietly went globalHow a Melbourne car classifieds business became a multinational marketplace operator, and why the ASX still seems to underrate it.
REA Group: how a News Corp side project became a property monopolyREA Group turned a modest listings site into one of the world's most profitable property portals. Priya Naidu digs into the numbers behind the dominance.
Afterpay: the instalment idea that turned into a $39 billion saleHow two Sydney entrepreneurs built buy-now-pay-later into a global habit, and sold it to Block in the biggest takeover in Australian corporate history.
SEEK: how a Melbourne jobs board became an Asian internet giantSEEK started as a scrappy job-listings site in 1997. Two decades on, the Bassat brothers' company owns some of Asia's biggest employment platforms. Here's how.
Reece: the plumbing supplier that snuck up on AmericaReece Group built a plumbing-supplies empire from a single Melbourne shopfront, then spent billions buying into the American market. Here's how the numbers stack up.
Ansell: the Dunlop offshoot that quietly gloves the worldFrom a Dunlop rubber offshoot to a global leader in protective and medical gloves, Ansell is one of Australia's least-noticed multinational success stories.
Macquarie Group: how Australia's 'millionaire factory' became a global infrastructure bankFrom a modest Hill Samuel offshoot to a $70-billion ASX giant operating across 34 countries, Macquarie's rise is one of the stranger success stories in Australian business history.
Computershare: the Melbourne company that owns the world's share registriesFrom a small Melbourne back office, Computershare quietly became the dominant force in global share registry services — an invisible giant hiding in plain sight on the ASX.
Canva: how two Perth founders built one of the world's most valuable private software companiesMelanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht started with school yearbooks in Perth. What they built next reshaped how the world makes visual content.
CSL: how a government lab became one of the world's great biotech companiesFrom a Depression-era serum laboratory in Melbourne to a $130 billion global giant, CSL's transformation is one of the most remarkable privatisation stories in Australian history.
Pro Medicus: the quiet Melbourne software company that became an ASX darlingPro Medicus built medical-imaging software over decades before the ASX noticed. Here's how a small radiology tech firm became one of Australia's most remarkable software stories.
Cochlear's competitive moat: how a single Australian company dominates world hearing implantsCochlear holds roughly 60% of the global cochlear implant market. Here's how it built that position, who is trying to close the gap, and where the real risks lie.
Graeme Clark and the long road to the bionic earBefore Cochlear became a global medical device giant, one Melbourne professor spent decades convincing sceptics that a multi-channel implant could restore hearing. This is how he did it.
How Cochlear turned a Melbourne lab into a global hearing-implant empireFrom Graeme Clark's University of Melbourne lab in the 1970s to a multi-billion-dollar ASX giant, Cochlear's rise is one of Australian industry's most instructive stories.
Atlassian: how two Sydney graduates built a global software empire without a sales forceMike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar bootstrapped Atlassian from a $10,000 credit card loan into a Nasdaq-listed giant. Here's how they did it.
WiseTech Global: how Richard White built a logistics-software empire from SydneyWiseTech Global's CargoWise platform quietly became the operating system for global freight. Here's how Richard White pulled it off.
Brambles and CHEP: how Australia built a global empire on a blue palletBrambles is one of Australia's largest companies by global revenue — and almost nobody outside logistics has heard of it. Here's how a pallet-pooling model conquered the world.
Aristocrat Leisure: how a Sydney poker-machine maker became a global gaming giantFrom a factory floor in Sydney to slot-machine floors in Las Vegas and mobile gaming apps worldwide — the unlikely ascent of Aristocrat Leisure.
ResMed: how a Sydney sleep lab became a global respiratory giantResMed started as a single researcher's obsession with sleep apnoea and grew into a dual-listed, multi-billion-dollar global business. Here's how it happened.