February 2025 Australian Manufacturing Grows

It is official. Australian Manufacturing is back in growth with the best results since November 2022.

This information comes from the Australia S&P Global Manufacturing PMI and we get notified when the results come out because we contribute to the survey. This continues on from the good signs of growth last month as reported in Australian PMI recovering 2025. So slow growth at 50.4 but still, growth. Note: anything above 50 is growth.

So what does this mean?

Australian Manufacturing is a very important sector for the Australian Economy with 1M direct full time jobs. That’s right, 1 milliton full time jobs in Australian Manufacturing. There are only 9.4M full time jobs in the whole economy. Plus it creates between 2.5 and 5 indirect jobs in other industries for every direct job in Australian Manufacturing. Making it responsible for more than a quarter of all full time jobs in Australia.

I think that is worth looking after!

Compete where you can

It is quite annoying that the media portrays it as on its deathbed. It isn’t easy to be competitive when you are in a high cost of doing business economy but then again, so is Japan, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland … You get the point. What they don’t try and do is compete on lowest price and neither should we. As an example, we recently opened our own Automated SMT PCB Assembly factory in Dandenong South and the first question I am usually asked is “So you are competing on Price”?

My answer is usually quite a surprise. It is “We absolutely are not competing on price”!

Which raises the obvious query of “So how can you compete”? As if price is the only option. Price is the easy one to measure. $ versus $. It is also the lazy one to measure. So here are the things we compete on, and depending on the client several could apply at the same time:

• Time from order to delivery
• Ease of doing business
• We give you the same priority whether you want 1 or 500
• Industry 4.0 – we can do product high mix at varying production volumes with fast turnaround and traceability
• Efficiency of having direct access to the design team if there are any issues – eg. component substitutions being more common now than it used to be
• Lower setup costs (this is the price we do win at)
• And occassionally terms of business though this is very case dependent

AU Manufacturing PMI Feb 2025

So that little uptick on the right is January and February 2025 where we had a PMI of 50.2 and 50.4 respectively with.

And for your viewing pleasure, here is a video of our Automated SMT PCB Assembly line in action in our factory. We have added better fume extraction and visual inspection since then. We are not trying to take business off the other Contract Electronics Manufacturers in Australia. We are helping clients who aren’t yet ready for high volume production because they need prototypes or a small run for field trial units. We even partner with other local Contract Electronics Manufacturers helping their clients with design services and even the initial small production runs so they can get off the ground.

So let the good news continue.

Successful Endeavours specialise in Electronics Design, Embedded Software Development and Electronics Manufacturing, focusing on products that are intended to be profitably Made In Australia. Ray Keefe has developed market leading electronics products in Australia for more than 40 years.

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