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 has 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 family-owned 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!
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.
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.
AMT: Western Sydney is about to explode with the Advanced Manufacturing Research Facility. How do you see the future of that area?
Matt Holloway: 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.
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.
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.
China stopped importing our soft plastics a few years ago. And they’re now about to stop importing our hard plastics as well. So, what to do with all this plastic, you ask? We’ll be set up to be able to cater for that increased demand locally.
We set up a business called NewGen Recycling, and this has a unique value proposition. The conventional recyclers will say to companies out there. ‘Yeah, look, we’re a recycler, but we’re only interested in your hard plastics. We can’t do anything with your soft plastic.’ So, what NewGen sets out to do, we’ve got some commingling intellectual property where we can say, we can take all plastics, hard, soft, anything you’ve got, we take it inhouse, we commingled it all together. And then we put it through an extruder with some new tooling and we make fence posts and dunnage for the rural sector, for the building industry.
AMT: How do you see the next ten years for manufacturing in Australia?
Matt Holloway: I believe Australian manufacturing is well and truly back on the map. I think COVID has demonstrated the lack of sovereign capability Australia has. We’re so reliant on external supply chains. And I think the last six months has shown building costs going through the roof. A container coming out of Malaysia used to be $4,000, and it’s over $20,000 now. The federal government and the consumer needs to back Aussie manufacturers now. We can produce quality, cutting-edge innovations right on our doorstep rather than ordering abroad. I think we’re truly back on the map and the next ten years is going to be really strong for Aussie manufacturing.
When companies like Holloway, and other people in other industries are finding capital to invest in themselves and then people to come out with new technologies and new ways of doing things, I think there should be a really positive outlook.