WA Shipbuilder, Austal Wins Advanced Manufacturer of the Year

5 Oct 08

Western Australian shipbuilder, Austral Ltd was crowned as the Advanced Manufacturer of the year at this weeks inaugural Advanced Manufacturing Awards hosted by AMTIL in Melbourne.

The Gala event attended by over 350 industry people also saw Victorian precision CNC machining company, Production Parts take out the Exporter of the Year Award, and Queensland's Advanced Robotic Technologies take out the coveted Innovator of the year Award.

Austal Ltd is now Western Australia's largest manufacturing exporter, achieving $383.9 million in export revenues for 2007-08.

The Henderson based company upped its WA export revenues by 20 per cent on the previous financial year and reporting a record net profit of $52 million.

During the last year, Austal's Australian operations has reached a number of significant milestones, including the completed a 65-metre vehicle passenger ferry for the Sultanate of Oman, three 57-metre Armidale Class Patrol Boats for the Royal Australian Navy, an 88-metre vehicle passenger ferry for the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, and seven 48-metre fast ferries for delivery to the Venetian Resort in Macau.

Production Parts have been one of the key suppliers of precision machined aerospace components for the Joint Strike Fighter project producing Lockheed Martin's F-35 fighters for the Australian Defence Department.

Advanced Robotics Technologies produce state-of-the-art CNC routers and plasma CNC profile machines. ART export their products all over the world including their large-scale profile cutting machines capable of cutting aluminium sheets 20m long x 2.8m wide for cutting of aluminium sheet sections for the ship building industry.

The Advanced Manufacturing Awards gala dinner also saw AMTIL release their new corporate look and announce many of their new initiatives and business services.

Other major award winners on the night were:

Advanced Manufacturing Young Ambassador of the Year: Mr. Robbie O'Brien
Advanced Manufacturing Designer of the Year: Mr. Sheldon Vaughan

ManufactureLink congratulates all award winners on an outstanding effort and applauds AMTIL for staging such a fantastic industry event. We eagerly look forward to next years awards.

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