Case Studies
Issue No. 5 - April/June 2002
Ahrens Engineering
In the Top Grade
Few companies at the leading edge of their business today can trace their origin back to horse and buggy days. Fewer are still owned by the family of tradesmen that founded them.
Ahrens Engineering has been a regional South Australian business since Johann Karl Wilhelm Ahrens (great grandfather of managing director, Stefan Ahrens) came home from the Ballarat goldfields in 1905 to buy the farriers’ shop in Sheaoak Log, near the Barossa Valley.
The arrival of mains power in 1964 marked the beginning of Ahrens growth, as the company began fabricating equipment and structures, mainly for nearby farms. Until the early 1990s Ahrens remained a small yet successful business, with a turnover of $3.2 million in 1992; it had grown to $32 million in the 1999/2000 financial year with a projected result for 2002 of more than $40 million.
Ahrens made the BRW Fast Growing 100 Private Companies List for 5 consecutive years during the late 1990s and was a runner up finalist in the 2000 SA Manufacturer of the Year Awards.
A proprietary company managed by chairman, Bob Ahrens and managing director, Stefan Ahrens, the Ahrens Engineering Group now includes three divisions:
- Ahrens Construction: Design and Construction of industrial buildings, warehouse/office complexes.
- Commodity Storage and Handling: Design and Construction of large grain storage and handling buildings and silos.
- Steel Fabrication: Processing of structural steel and plate work from the above sectors and the mining and mineral processing sectors.
Traces of the group’s rural beginnings remain in its areas of specialisation, but design and construction is now the group’s main business.
“The transformation and resultant desire to further grow the company has provided us with several challenges”, according to business development manager, Peter Callaghan. A principle test is to convince major eastern seaboard companies that a company with a ...
