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COMPANY FOCUS
The Holloway Group The Holloway Group of companies are passionate advocates of the power of Australian manufacturing and are dedicated to bringing manufacturing back to Australian shores. By Paul Hellard.
Matthew Holloway been Managing Director at the Holloway Group for over a decade now, working his way through the business from being a die setter on the factory floor to the organisation’s leading executive. Under his vision and guidance, the company has expanded from a single business entity, specialising in the manufacturing of plastic storage containers, to a portfolio of seven brands and now a major player in the recycled plastics, sustainability, and innovation arenas. AMT: So, tell us the Matt Holloway story. Matt Holloway: The Holloway Group is effectively a familyowned organisation. My old man was a tool maker by trade, back in the eighties. And as tool maker, he bought an injection moulding machine and started to contract-mould stuff for a bunch of different clients, from swizzle sticks for cocktails, right through to thong straps. Straight out of school, I did civil engineering and hated it. Didn't know what I wanted to do for quite some time. And then, I jumped in the factory floor, this would have been around 2005. I started off as a die setter for three or four years, mould-setting was taking the moulds in and out of the machines, working overhead cranes, all that type of stuff. I learned a lot of skills around robots and starting machines up and then jumped into sales. I had a sales cap on for a few years as Business Development Manager for the contract moulding business. Years later, the incumbent CEO fell ill, and I was thrust into this leadership position and the rest is history!
AMT: Western Sydney is about to explode with the Advanced Manufacturing Research Facility. How do you see the future of that area? MH: One of the Holloway Group brands, Ausdrain™ specialises in stormwater management and urban design. The business of implementing projects and infrastructure to make greener cities and conserve our most precious commodity: water. I think that's a big part of what we're seeing in Western Sydney at the moment. It's all over the East Coast as well. We have a huge demand for residential housing and that's what has kept our economy fluid over the last couple of years, really it’s the building sector. We're coming up with solutions to provide all stakeholders in the building and landscaping supply chain, products to make their life a lot easier. And everything we’re doing now, has a real sustainable approach to it, closed-loop type of applications with our recycling business, as well as BIAX, AusDrain, GeoHex. Group Tooling is like an engineering arm of the Holloway group. In this business, we do a lot of fabrication. That’s the brand that really delivers our injection moulds. Pulse 3D is a 3D printing company. This one's kind of reverse-engineered that go-to-market strategy where we're trying to build a market to then enable us to pull the trigger on infrastructure there. So that's going quite well, and we also have the business called Plasmar and this is a really cool outfit. We're turning soft plastic waste into rural fence posts, dunnage and sleepers.
At that point, 2008, we were doing a tenth of the revenue we do now, and were very much a contract moulding business. We had a couple of our own product lines, and that was really when the overseas competitive landscape was brutal, everything was being manufactured overseas. Everyone was procuring everything abroad, due to cost. I've just made a very concerted effort in building our own proprietary offering.
Holloway Group is leading Australian plastics industry in automation, utilising robotics to minimise labour costs in a forever tightening manufacturing market. Our 15 machines utilise either 3 or 6-axis robots to extract parts from the machines, which enables our skilled operators to often work on two or three machines at one time. Our robots also guarantee consistency of cycle time, ensuring we can give our customers the most competitive price.
And we've now morphed from that contract moulding business. The injection moulding process really doesn't resonate with a whole lot of people. It's more the products that we sell and just by default, we have that feather in our cap where we can manufacture our own products rather than subcontracting it out to companies like the contract moulding business.
At the moment, the business does 300-tons worth of recycled polypropylene a month. And I would say 80% of that comes from overseas. So, we really set out to take control of our own supply chain and build demand inhouse to be able to effectively start to service our own companies through our own recycling facility.
AMT AUG 2022
