The Team's Board Report - Mainfreight

15
Australia
Australia Group Manager’s Comment – Rodd Morgan
Team
As expected, this past year has
been both challenging and exciting
for our Australian businesses and
we are pleased to advise that our
hopes for the coming year have
never been stronger.
Regular readers will know that the
Mainfreight Australian business
consists of three main activities
being International freight
forwarding, Warehousing and
Transport operations. Mainfreight
International provides a full array of
importing and exporting freight
services across the world.
Mainfreight Logistics is our
warehousing business that
manages over 100 different
customers’ products within eight
warehouses across the country.
Finally, Mainfreight Transport, along
with our interstate distribution
services, has Chemcouriers who
specialises in hazardous goods
distribution, FTL (full loads), Metro
(local) and Owens Transport who
focuses mainly on carting shipping
containers from the wharf to our
customers and back.
Our business strategy is to
influence the flow of freight in, out
and across Australia by offering full
scale, Mainfreight-controlled
services to support our customers
in terms of their various supply
chain needs. Our thriving activities
in the USA, Europe, New Zealand
and Asia are a large part of the
success we are starting to see in
Australia and will become even
more important to our performance
and aspirations as each year
passes by.
It is not being too negative to note
that it is becoming more difficult for
our local manufacturers to remain
competitive against imports with
the rising Aussie dollar, on top of
various government policies.
Our strategy and strong capabilities,
particularly in International freight,
Logistics and Wharf cartage have
us well equipped to be able to win
more of the distribution of the ever
increasing amount of imported
goods we are seeing at the expense
of our local manufacturers.
Combined last year, we increased
our revenues across our Australian
activities over the previous year by
almost AU$60 million or 17% and
our profits increased by 24%.
This is a satisfactory result (I trust
the Board agrees with that!) and
reflects an enormous amount of
dedication and expertise from our
teams in all the areas that we
operate in.
We know however that we have so
much more to achieve. The pursuit
of better quality in our Transport
and Warehousing operations is a
priority and is well under way as is
our timetable to open new branches
in Cairns and Albury to add to the
new branch recently opened on the
Gold Coast.
Our substantial investment in our
Melbourne-based transport training
facility led by Raewyn Glamuzina, is
a very important investment in our
long-term future that will help
ensure that every team member has
a deeper understanding of our
history, culture, processes and
quality expectations – it is then up
to each individual and our branch
managers to uphold these lessons
learnt at the ‘coal face’, which is
where it counts.
We must continue to strive hard to
be a business made up of people
who are easy to deal with and who
understand what customer service
really means.
Our International team is
concentrating intently on finding
ways to increase margins and
growth, and has several exciting
initiatives and services underway
that include recently opening new
branches in Newcastle and
Townsville. We have no doubt that
we can rapidly become the biggest
and best freight forwarder in our
region.
Our Warehousing team is
developing a sales team who will
ensure that we have a constant
pipeline of prospective new
customers to keep warehouse
utilisation high.
We are also working hard at
improving housekeeping,
presentation and overall efficiency
of our operations to improve
margins.
New business acquisition remains
a high priority for the Owens team
along with setting some lofty targets
that will really stretch the team’s
imagination. We can also probably
find some great new opportunities
to get more deeply involved in
supplying freight services to the
resources sector – particularly out
of Brisbane and Perth!
Our team is well aware that a core
principle of our business is to
promote from within where at all
possible. We have many examples
of this in operation right now
including a large number of our
team who have been with us for
over 30 years and their entire
working life. However, when we do
need to recruit, we like the idea of
finding intelligent, bright, happy
people who may very well have an
education beyond high school that
they have had to work very hard to
achieve. They would very definitely
need to be somebody who could be
a branch manager one day. If you
know anybody like this, please give
one of us a call. A business full of
people like this is a great place to
be.
Opportunity for growth in Australia
is almost limitless and we each
need to be thinking about how we
might help to find new business –
whether you happen to be in sales
or not. We have a wonderfully
skilled and committed team along
with highly relevant and diverse
services to back us up. This sees
us being well positioned to thrive in
a changing landscape that is
becoming increasingly difficult for
our one dimensional competitors to
keep up. It is true though, that our
pace of growth will accelerate even
more so as each of us comes to
really understand that, although we
are made up of businesses that
operate in slightly different areas of
the supply chain, we are in fact
ONE MAINFREIGHT.