Keep doors open to catch bounce, says exporter

By SOPHIE FOSTER

THE lengths that Barry Thomas has gone to in order to keep the doors of a Brisbane medical products manufacturing plant open have put him in the running for a prestigious national export award on Monday.

Staff at Eight Mile Plains-based Cook Medical Australia have nominated their managing director for this year's Australian Export Hero award.

He is one of six people up for the award, whose previous winners include Gina Rhinehart and The Wiggles.

“Remaining in business is the biggest single challenge,” Mr Thomas told The Courier-Mail. “Keeping the doors open so that if things do improve and we can become competitive, we can take advantage of that.”

According to the Australian Institute of Export, which issues the award, this year's nominees have often spent personal time away from family and friends “in far flung and often dangerous locations around the world to have achieved success not only for their business but also their industry”.

Mr Thomas - who spends about 200 days a year developing markets around the Asia Pacific region - spends the rest of his days fighting for a post mining-boom future for Australian manufacturing.

His goal is to get “government to understand that the mining boom is a finite event and once that starts to go off you're going to have not a lot left in the background.

“We employ 400 people, a lot of whom are women. If this place closed down there's not a lot of other opportunities out there. There's a lot of rhetoric about `let's be smarter' but that doesn't solve the problem of how we keep the average worker in a position that feeds their families.”

The factory produces and sells medical devices and implants to 130 countries.

A combination of local sales, which provide a natural hedging, and some offshore manufacturing give the plant the edge it needs in an environment of high costs and above par Aussie dollar.

“We sub-contract to two companies in China who do some fabricating for us. We do the high-end technical part of the manufacturing here,” he said of a particular needle product.

“The stuff that's at risk from an intellectual property perspective, we keep here.

“The difficulty going forward, certainly for us, is if you lose those skills there's probably little chance that we'd ever bring that back, so that labour is lost permanently because it is so efficient to do it offshore. So it's a good model but there is a downside to it.”

With about 80 per cent of Cook Medical products bound for export, Mr Thomas wants to see governments of all levels tailor assistance packaZoom Lebron XIII 13