Tall Poppy: Kerry Ambrose Pearce

Tall Poppy: Kerry Ambrose Pearce

The new centre, spread over two hectares, is the culmination of 20 years of work by Ambrose-Pearce in consolidating his franchise into the Territory’s largest privately owned automotive group. The facility took a year to design, and three years to build. The construction presented the staff of 120 with special challenges in continuing to operate while building activity carried on around them. But it was completed in May 2008, with administration on the top floor, sales operations and service on the ground floor and a storage parking lot for 200 cars underneath. A new Mercedes showroom was completed in February.

The opening of the new facility also marks a long-awaited achievement for Ambrose-Pearce, 60, coming at a time when his life is taking new directions. He has, admittedly “with great trepidation,” recently picked up his Senior’s Card. With son Gregory taking over the controls of the day to day operations of Kerry’s Automotive Group, the elder Ambrose-Pearce turns his attention to a myriad of other business, community and recreational pursuits.

He is half owner in Airpower NT, the biggest truck franchise in the Territory, located in Darwin and Alice Springs. The company owns the NT franchises to sell International, Iveco, Ditchwitch, Champion compressors, the Bobcat range, all Kobota products from mowers to graders to tractors, plus the top selling truck range in the Territory - Isuzu.

Ambrose-Pearce held the Isuzu franchise before going in partnership with Peter Rau in Airpower, but he found the trucks were just too big for his car site, so he went into partnership and moved them off his lot. “Trucks and cars don’t mix together well,” he says. From that lack of space, Airpower NT was born. Peter Rau has since retired and his son Grant Rau is now Kerry’s partner and managing director.

SPNT is Kerry’s salary packaging company. They approach employers by demonstrating how they can help retain their staff by salary packaging—providing incentives like paying maintenance on their cars, lease payments, or computers, within Australian Government tax laws. They are legal inducements designed to hold on to valued employees. It’s a business that kicked off seven years ago and now has offices in most states, handling groups with lots of employees, like the Gold Coast City Council (4000 employees), Billabong and Charles Darwin University.

Ambrose-Pearce is a 50-50 partner in the Territory Rams Home Loans franchise, and, in order to satisfy his interest in flying, a half owner in a small airline company (partnered with John Hardy of Hardy Aviation) called Vintage Airlines, the owner of the splendid DC-3 at Darwin airport. The 203 cm (six foot eight inch) tall businessman is also strongly involved in community work as chair of the Government House Foundation, a group dedicated to enhancing the gardens and interior of the historic Administrator’s residence. He remains actively involved with the Rotary Club of Darwin, raising funds for a range of community projects.

Kerry Ambrose-Pearce has come a long way from his seaside origins in the village of Robe, South Australia, population 500. His father died when he was just eight so, never finishing high school, he moved to Adelaide, married his wife Raeleigh in 1969, and went to work for Holden. Rising through the ranks, after 11 years he was offered a managerial position in Darwin. “When I was offered the job up here with the Sutton family (who owned the franchise) to become the general manager, it was very enticing because it offered a house, and yearly airfares for the whole family back down south,” he recalls. “There was a share of the profits if you made money.”

He and Darwin were a good fi t so, when the Sutton family offered a chance to purchase the business, he bought the Darwin Holden franchise, striking out on his own. “I just thought that my career may be limited in a big corporation by my lack of education,” he says. “And also, the retail side of the business was so exciting.”

Today Kerry’s Automotive is one of Australia’s most successful Holden dealerships, and Ambrose-Pearce enjoys a nationwide profile within the industry. He has been national president of the Motor Trades Association of Australia since 2007, having already served as president of the Australian Automobile Dealers Association for two years. He sees an industry in the midst of massive economic and technological changes. The economic downturn struck Darwin in November and, though margins are being squeezed, volumes remain stable. Kerry’s has retained all employees.

Technologically, they have seen a “massive trend” in fleets downsizing their cars. Ambrose-Pearce believes there will be three “green cars” released this year for sale, featuring radical changes in energy consumption and style. But will those changes adversely affect sales and service at Kerry’s Automotive? “We supply a transport product,” explains Ambrose-Pearce. “Whether it’s electric or diesel, petrol or gas, we supply transport. If we would have been here 100 years ago we probably would have sold horses.”

Networking between nations

While commodity prices are slumping worldwide and mines placed in care and maintenance, Indonesia’s giant coal and gold mines continue to produce for both domestic and export customers. “Overall, the Indonesian economy is reasonably insulated from the global economic downturn because the majority of their economic growth of their GDP is domestically driven,” explains Craig Senger, Austrade’s Trade Commissioner for Mining, Oil and Gas. “Exports are only a small percentage of their total economy. So, as a result, they missed out on the benefits of the boom but they don’t feel so much of the bust with the global downturn.”

Joining those Australian exhibitors was a trade delegation from the Northern Territory, representing a range of companies involved in the Top End’s growing mining support industry. Organised by the NT Government, members of the delegation sought to network with Indonesian supply managers, some of whom import hundreds of millions of dollars worth of machinery, maintenance staples, chemicals and catering supplies every year to isolated locations across the vast archipelago.

Many of those mining operations sent representatives to OzMine, including Weda Bay Nickel, Newcrest Mining, and Bumi Resources’ gigantic Kaltim Prima Coal (KPC) mine in Kalimantan. One of the five largest coal mines in the world, KPC spends over US$0.5 billion a year on supplies and fuel for its staff and extensive fleet of heavy vehicles. The company employs a staff of 3500 but, if contractors are counted, more than 15,000 people work at the minesite, all requiring supply from outside.

Much of that support is accessed from as far away as southern Australia, the USA and even Europe, taking up to three months lead time in delivery. That lead time drives costs up because the company must stockpile goods and equipment in inventory, rather than run out. Darwin, lying just a few days sailing time from any point in Eastern Indonesia, is well placed to take a stronger involvement in the supply of Indonesian operations. “When the price of coal goes down, we want to also reduce our production costs. And that’s not easy,” says Hilda Basar, supply manager for KPC. “When you talk about reducing costs, you’re also talking about cutting down the supply chain. Darwin is closer to Indonesia compared to other cities in Australia and there are suppliers who could supply us with a shorter lead time. That would be a benefit. That means our inventory would be reduced.”

Members of the Territory delegation were finding that the opportunities abounded and they were getting positive responses at their display stands from Indonesian buyers. Brad Campbell, Blackwoods’ regional manager, said their company was new to Indonesia and being there had opened their eyes to what the market demanded.

The company had travelled to Jakarta by qualifying for the NT Government’s Trade Support Scheme, where up to half their travel and accommodation was subsidised. “From our perspective, if we could pick up three or four genuine leads, it’s really worthwhile for us,” Campbell said on the first day. “I’ve already had enough leads to justify the expense of us coming here, and the support the NT Government has given us makes it possible for us to attend.”

Some of the delegates were veterans of expos like OzMine. Chris Gahan of Darwin’s Engine Engineering has made a number of trips that convinced him that the opportunities available in Indonesia warranted him opening an office there. He went into partnership with an Indonesian company forming PT Powertrain Solutions in the coal mining centre of Balikpapan, opening an office and, more recently, a workshop. “People are starving up here for reliability and good maintenance and we saw a bit of a window there and moved in,” says Gahan. “And what we plan to do is to bring machines in and do refurbishment - we’ll pull the components out, rebuild them, send some of it back to our engineering facility in Darwin, then send it back up to Balikpapan and put it all back together at the end of the day.”

One Darwin businessman has done so well supplying light vehicles and maintenance services to Indonesian mining operations that he’s moved to Balikpapan. Trevor Kroemer went into a partnership, opening Transkon five years ago and, after a period of learning what the market demanded, the business has blossomed. “We had to market our product as a quality product, and it was more expensive, so people were reluctant to deal with us in the beginning,” Kroemer recalls. “But eventually they recognised it was better to pay more for a quality vehicle and quality service in the long run. Slowly that’s caught on. Now we have more business than we can handle.”