CEO Update: A Message from George Yammouni

Colleagues,

This is my third update for 2025, I hope you are progressing well with your plans for the year so far.

Australian PMI

It was great to see the Australian PMI in expansion mode. Business confidence is the highest this month since February 2022.

In terms of August performance, the PMI rose from 51.3 to 53, this dramatic increase was the fastest expansion seen since September 2022. New orders were stronger, and naturally outputs rose, export, hiring and purchase activities also positively increased for the month. Overall, price pressures remained low.

New Zealand PMI

The BusinessNZ (BNZ) Performance of Manufacturing Index (PMI) in New Zealand retracted this month, down 2.9 points to 49.9 from July’s 52.8. Overall, the region is facing uncertainties with flat sales, cautious customers and uneven growth. Despite retraction across all indices, negative sentiment eased.

OEM Training for our Engineers

I’m pleased to share we’ve recently reviewed our OEM training conducted over the last 6 months, 12 of our engineers have spent over 1,600 hours on training overseas at OEM facilities, that’s 200 days. The main OEM’s of focus have been, Krauss Maffei, TRUMPF, JFY, Makino and SOCO.

Thank you for your patience if this has meant your preferred engineer has not been available.

Company update

AI

As a business overall, we are looking at smarter ways of working and incorporating AI where suitable to improve productivity, whilst enhancing client experience. This includes projects focused on accelerating the processing of spare parts identification and ordering, tools to assist our engineers in achieving faster and more accurate diagnosis, and personal productivity measures to increase the effectiveness of our sales and marketing team.

Teams and Portfolio expansion

Our teams continue to expand in WA, QLD and within the International Response Centre (IRC) as demand increases for our services.

We’re also looking to expand our product offerings in the realm of plastics and fabrication, as well as additional software for MES/Smart Factory solutions, condition monitoring, and overall digital transformation with AI enablement where it makes sense.

Additionally, we are ramping up our client experience measurement methods to increase the data sample size and ensure the data we gather is both qualitative and quantitative. Therefore, we’ll continue to seek feedback at key intervals within the communication cycle and very much appreciate your willingness to participate and provide us such feedback so we can continue to evolve and improve.

As always, I’m keen to hear from you at any time and hoping to see many more of you in the coming months.

 

Kind Regards,

George Yammouni