Wheel good for jobs
Carbon Revolution workforce tipped to race past 1000
CARBON Revolution is expecting its Geelong workforce to soar past 1000 in the next five years.
The carbon fibre wheelmaker is planning to keep adding jobs at its Waurn Ponds factory as it simultaneously drives down the cost of production through its focus on automation.
CEO Jake Dingle said jobs growth in Geelong would continue to be strong as long as the newly listed company succeeded in increasing the rate of production at the rate the market was demanding.
“We are already over 400 people, we could be triple that in the next five years,” Mr Dingle said. “That is despite a continued dramatic reduction in the labour hours per wheel.”
Carbon Revolution has more than 330 people involved in production roles, the Waurn Ponds factory operating three shifts around the clock as it ramps up production this year.
Armed with $30 million from the floating of the company on the ASX, Carbon Revolution is investing in additional capacity to meet growing demand from existing programs. In the next 12 months this increase comes mainly from the two Ford Mustang models and Ferrari’s 488 Pista and SF90 Stradale.
It expects its production rate to hit 32,000 wheels a year by July next year, up from a rate of just 12,000 a year in August.
Its current phase of industrialisation focuses on automating production processes to get further increases in production capacity while reducing costs. It expects the average cost per wheel to drop by a third this financial year.
To help it achieve its industrialisation goals, it has brought in people from Ford, Toyota and Holden, some of whom had been poached overseas as Australian car production came to an end.
They include Holden’s former director of vehicle operations at Adelaide, Martin Merry, who is now the Waurn Ponds plant manager, and industrialisation director Luke Preston, who returned to Australia after more than four years with Tesla in the US.
Having previously worked with Ford at Broadmeadows and at Holden Special Vehicles, Mr Preston ended up leading Tesla’s Model 3 general assembly project from start to finish.
He said working at Carbon Revolution offered the opportunity to reverse the decline in manufacturing in Australia.
“People won’t get the opportunities I got to automate a lot of things because we sent manufacturing offshore,” he said.
Mr Preston said Tesla had recruited a lot of engineers from Australia in recent years.
“I want that opportunity to be in Australia, so I came back so that I could lead the charge with setting up these kinds of processes here,” he said.
Carbon Revolution was officially listed on the ASX yesterday.