Page 28 - Australasian Paint & Panel Jan-Feb 2023

Market intelligence
28
PAINT&PANEL JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2023
AMA GROUP
Sites: 161
Employees: 3280
Type of work: All collision, parts supply Established 2006
Apprentices: 350+
Funding: ASX listed
Sites: ACT, QLD, NSW, WA, TAS, VIC, NZ
AMA GROUP HAS BEEN UNDERGOING A
radical overhaul after a review of its net- work which has contracted by 19 sites since last year. The pandemic proved challenging with volume and now that has returned one of the major challeng- es is the skills shortage. We talked to COO Matt Cooper.
“I think it’s fair to say that the last 12 months has not been what anyone ex- pected. There was an air of optimism about the 12 months in terms of coming out of COVID lockdowns and everything getting back to normal and I think what we got was something very, very differ- ent. We had another wave of COVID which caused disruption early on in the piece. We finally came out of it and we got volume back but with volume came inflation and that had been hidden for the last couple of years because I think everyone had been hanging on to what- ever volume they could get.” he said.
“We then had to start to really address
that through pricing conversations and there were some pretty hard conversa- tions but we needed to have them. We achieved good progress and I think we achieved that for the entire industry as a result of those very public conversations about the need to be paid fairly.
“I think the other aspect that we had was the great resignation going on as people came out of COVID as well. Peo- ple reassessed their lives and made deci- sions that in many cases meant leaving the industry. So, I’d describe the last 12 months as pretty challenging.”
In terms of the coming year Cooper said: “The next 12 months is more about growth. We’ve realigned, reset and estab- lished the baseline now. So what we’re
now looking at is growing in terms of our network and our people. We’re still in- vesting heavily in apprentices with a very strong apprentice program. We’re sup- porting the industry through bringing in overseas candidates and workers to bol- ster the local staffing numbers.
“We are also investing heavily in train- ing of our own people to make sure our technicians keep up to speed with what they need to as the market continues to evolve and progress with the technolo- gies and vehicles.
So for us this is about ‘How do we im- prove the base that we’ve got and con- tinue to grow and get back on the acquisi- tion trail, back on the greenfield trail and the enhancement of the existing facilities to increase capacity and productivity. So it’s a very positive outlook from the base that we’re at at the moment.
Investing in apprentices is a long term strategy, however the skills shortage is an issue right now. To address that AMA Group already has 486 visa workers in place with approximately 75 in the pipe- line at the time of writing. A further 50 or so will overseas technicians will be made offers in January.
“We’ve just run our second recruit- ment drive over in the Philippines, so we’ll make offers to those people very shortly. This business used to bring in about 100 overseas workers a year to bolster the resource profile that we had and obviously we’ve missed a couple of years there, so there’s a bit of catch-up required,” Cooper said.
ABOVE: Matt Cooper, AMA Group’s chief operating officer.
LEFT: AMA has a very impressive apprentice program with over 350 apprentices within the group.