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Construction has been one of the industries hardest hit by the recession, but Auckland-based Actronic Technologies is helping to ease the load.
While it felt the initial weight of the downturn too, the company is growing again after hatching a way to help quarries, mines, timber yards, ports and waste management companies carry more efficient loads.
Actronic's core business is electronics that provide load weight information to customers handling bulk materials with heavy machinery. Started by electronic engineers Doug Rankin and Bob Allison in a garden shed in 1979, the first projects included measuring forces on New Zealand's early America's Cup boats and calculating the weight of fishing trawler nets.
Then they created a measuring system called Loadrite to ensure rubbish trucks weren't fined for carrying too heavy a load.
From that success, the privately owned company moved into installing bulk material weighing systems on wheel loaders, excavators and conveyor belts, finding markets here and in 40 other countries, especially the US and Australia. Annual turnover grew to more than $20 million.
But Actronic was hit suddenly in the final quarter last year, when foreign quarrying, cement and logging companies shut down purchasing.
Actronic chief executive Mark Templeton says the company moved quickly, but was forced to reduce costs and make redundancies to survive. Then it released a strategy to give its existing customers a new added-value product - reporting ability.
"We focused on our big customers, and told them, 'We have a solution that can improve your efficiency'. Once they were out of shock mode, they realised if they were to stay in business they needed to be more effective," he says.
Using the Loadrite scales, a wheel-loader operator in a quarry can see in real time how much material it's loading. Actronic developed a simple extension, "taking weight information from a number of loaders, and conveyer belts and excavators all working at the same time, feeding it by modem to a computer in the office, so they can see exactly how efficiently the process is working," says Templeton. "So rather than simply selling weighing scales, we are now selling productivity-improvement information.
"In this new world, it's so much about how efficient are we producing that material; are we getting the margins that are possible?"
With offices in Auckland, China, the Netherlands and the US, Actronic is now tapping new markets, with growth areas in China, Europe, South Africa and Brazil. It is helping Aussie "garbos" get their rubbish loads right, weighing salt for icy US roads and junk in metal recycling plants.
"The crisis has forced us to focus on where the value is in our business, on where the value is for the customer. It has been a very painful process, but it has put our company into much better shape," Templeton says. "Construction was one of the first industries to be hit ... maybe our recovery is an indicator of what's happening now."
