Quickstep Holdings Limited, an Australian manufacturer of advanced carbon fiber composites, says that it is realigning its business to improve profitability and growth. The company plans to implement a number of important changes immediately,. ‘We have simplified our senior leadership structure, reducing the number of key management personnel, and have established a functional matrix organisation,’ said Quickstep CEO, Mark Burgess. ‘We have implemented an executive pay freeze and will continue with the freeze on directors’ fees. The OneQuickstep change management program, which we are rolling out, will see the removal of business segments and a strong focus on growth in our target market sectors.
‘We are refocusing our R&D and have capped investment at a net AUS$2.8 million for FY18, still between 4% and 5% of sales, which remains significant for a company of our size. This refocus will involve a rationalisation of our current R&D operations and will see a reduction of 12 full-time employees across the first half of FY18. […] Subject to appropriate program timing, we will be ceasing non-core programs that do not fit with our future growth plans, such as the Thales Hawkei project, which is glass-fiber based and does not use our core technologies.
‘Future growth is also important and we are making a number of investments in this area,’ he added. ‘We have created a new sales leader role on our executive team and are making investments in sales, bidding for new business and proposal resources (both systems and people). Our marketing and communications function has been strengthened.
Cost reduction
‘The outlook for Quickstep in the future is strong. We have solid, long-term contracts in place, continued JSF production growth and a strong defence aerospace ‘build to print’ outlook. We will be placing an increased focus on the aerospace secondary structures market (control surfaces and closure systems) and will look closely at all customer cost reduction opportunities, using Qure and QPS to address volume production constraints that exist with current technologies. In the longer-term we will be looking at partnership opportunities to take us into our target growth markets.’
This story is reprinted from material from Quickstep, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier.