The outlook is steady for MacTaggart Scott Australia (MTSA) according to its Adelaide Director Peter Richings, noting some resilience to many of the issues currently affecting businesses such as rising interest rates and energy prices.
“Our main concern is finding skilled workers”.
MTSA operates a 25-employee, 3000-square-meter purpose-built facility in Woodville. A subsidiary of its global entity based in Scotland supporting the manufacture of key systems in the naval defence industry, employing 350 people across three countries with a turnover of around A$69.6m.
“We have a small workforce here at our Woodville operation, but many of them are specialist engineers and are not easy to come by,” said Mr Richings.
The organisation requires highly skilled workers and is also limited by a level of Australian Government defence clearance that makes international headhunting tricky, but not impossible.
“We’ve hired out of the UK recently, but ran into troubles relating to working visas, acquiring permanent residency and, of course, when people come here they need somewhere to live. None of that is easy”.
MTSA is not alone in facing worker shortages, the South Australian Business Chamber and William Buck’s December Quarter Survey of Business Expectations detailed 58.3 per cent of respondents experienced labour shortages in the December quarter, with frequent commentary surrounding the lack of suitably skilled workers. Further, the survey revealed ‘access to labour’ was by far the main constraint identified by businesses hindering potential growth.
The South Australian branch of MacTaggart Scott, which opened in 2011, was established to work with its main customer ASC, Australia’s sovereign submarine builder, responsible for the fleet of Collins Class Submarines.
“Our primary focus is to support the Collins class vessels while expanding and diversifying our capability, but recent times have left us in rough water”.
MTSA originally expected to see the fleet of Collins vessels start to retire this decade and was working with Naval Group to be involved in the French-designed and Australian-made Attack-class submarine project, which was abandoned by (then) Prime Minister Scott Morrison in September 2021.
“The cancellation of the Attack-class submarine, which we expected to be involved with, resulted in four years of planning and hundreds of thousands of research dollars down the drain”.
Mr Richings noted the high level of investment, time and precision by engineers involved, along with the red tape associated with doing business with the defence industry, has been a disincentive for many SMEs, who understand they simply may not get the work, or their contracts could be pulled at any time.
Although experiencing waves, MTSA remains optimistic about the future, as many SMEs have expressed in recent months.
With engineers already working on plans to support the development of sovereign maintenance capability of systems used in the future nuclear-fuelled submarines, as part of the AUKUS agreement, there’s plenty for the company to work on.
“We are optimistic about the future, we now have the Collins submarines to look after following their lifetime extension, and we are continually expanding our capability through the development of an Australian supply chain and participation in local research and development projects”.
