Prologue Th is paper is a case study of an Australian corporate child care pro-vider, ABC Learning Ltd, when the corporation was at its height. In the months aft er this paper was fi rst completed, ABC Learning was dramatically aff ected by a volatile fi nancial market. In March 2008, a fi nancial crisis involving calls on margin loans held by the direc-tors of the parent company quickly resulted in a massive sell-off of international holdings, including 60 per cent of US kindergartens, to Morgan Stanley Private Equity (Korporaal 2008), in a context of tumbling share prices for the company. Margin calls resulted in stock sell-off by members of the board of directors, three of whom have now vacated the board. Th ese include the previous chair of the board, Sallyanne Atkinson, as well as Martin Kemp and William Bessemer. Th e CEO, Groves retained only 3,186 of his previous 20 million shares. It is understood that the major shareholder of ABC Learning is now Singapore-based Temasek holdings, and that one of the remaining directors, LeNeve Groves now holds no shares in the company. Several months aft er this turn of events, ABC Learning once more hit the Australian headlines in August and September 2008. Its shares were suspended from trading and a shareholder class action was prepared against the company on the basis of misstated earnings over previous years (John 2008). 232 • Press & Woodrow Although the fi nancial structure and wellbeing of ABC Learning and its current and former directors has signifi cantly changed, ABC Learning's domination of the landscape of child-care provision in Australia is a worthy case study. According to the ABC Learning website, ' ABC is the largest publicly listed childcare operator in the world, based on centre numbers' (ABC Learning Centres 2007a). Some of the information presented in this paper has been superseded by events. Nevertheless, the analysis continues to be relevant to the policy context of children's early education and care both in Australia and internationally, because of its illumination of the development, role and potential impact of commercial relationships in the framing and delivery of education and care for young children.