SWS Industries Pty Ltd appoints liquidator SV Partners to wind up the company
Feuding business partners and the economic slowdown have caused the owner of a six-year-old Queensland company to pull the plug, with liquidators appointed to wind up the business.
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TANKING FIRM TANKS
A Gold Coast company specialising in the supply, installation and maintenance of industrial water tanks and PVC fabric liners has gone to the wall.
Sam Stanley, the sole director and owner of SWS Industries Pty Ltd, appointed liquidator Dan Quinn of SV Partners last week to wind up the company.
Stanley, who launched the business six years ago and worked across Australia and PNG, declined to comment on Monday when asked why he had pulled the plug.
But Quinn told us the firm fell victim to a combination of feuding among business partners and a near complete cessation of work brought on by the virus-fuelled economic slowdown.
He said it was too early to determine how many creditors SWS had or how much they are owed.
GET CRACKING
It’s time for John O’Hara to get cracking, if you’ll excuse the pun.
The gent, who oversaw the growth of Sunny Queen Australia from a mere carton egg business into a diversified global player with numerous value-added products, is walking away from all those hens.
After 18 years at the helm of the Brisbane-based outfit, O’Hara finishes up on Tuesday and plans to recharge his batteries with a road trip around Queensland before finding a few non-executive roles to stay busy.
“You should go out when the business is strong, not when it’s getting weaker,’’ O’Hara, 62, told City Beat on Monday.
“For me, the timing was right and last November I said to the board that I wanted to go do something else.’’
BROADENING THE FOCUS
It was 2002 when O’Hara first started at Sunny Queen, which originally launched 51 years ago as largely a state-focused business known then as the Queensland Egg Board.
Now it’s a Queensland farmer-owned colossus which has a national presence, as well as a foothold across parts of Asia, the Pacific and the Middle East.
The transformation started four years after O’Hara’s arrival, when the company began using a small factory at Coolangatta to broaden its focus to include a range of egg-based foods.
By 2016 it ploughed $40 million into a state-of-the-art manufacturing and distribution plant at Carole Park, where it churns out omelettes, quiches, fritters, French toast and more from about 200,000 eggs every week.
“Just when other companies in food and agriculture were selling up and moving interstate and offshore, we believed that there was a great opportunity to invest locally,” O’Hara said.
Sunny Queen has now seized a sizeable chunk of the nation’s breakfast market, estimated to be worth about $7.4 billion a year.
EARNING HEAPS
O’Hara leaves the company in sound financial shape, with Sunny Queen generating a 32 per cent lift in net profit to nearly $10.7 million in the last financial year. That was based on sales revenues reaching a record high of almost $380 million, up 8.5 per cent.
O’Hara said the current financial year will obviously be far more challenging because of COVID-19 but, surprisingly, he expects the firm to deliver a broadly similar result.
While demand for Sunny Queen’s ready-meal offerings from airlines, cruise ships, restaurants and the like dried up thanks to coronavirus, supermarkets picked up much of the slack.
Apparently the lockdown and a pivot to working from home encouraged plenty of us to eat more of the company’s prepared meals, as well as their eggs branded with the distinctive “smiley’’ icon.
Taking over as CEO is Julie Proctor, who has worked in various senior management roles at the business over the past 15 years. She was appointed in February.