Winning a share of $US2.4 billion in army contracts has not been easy for Jamie Bruce, a high school dropout who played hooker for the Port Macquarie Sharks.
| Skipping over choppy waters at 30 nautical miles an hour on a lake at the base of Colorado’s Front Range Mountains, the US military’s latest boating technology – made by Australians – suddenly makes a sharp 360-degree turn.
Birdon won the contract to build up to 491 of these aluminium-hull, seven-metre long Bridge Erection Boats . The vessel’s purpose, as the name would suggest, is to support floating structures that have been designed to replace bridges destroyed in wars or natural disasters.$2.4 billion worth of US military projects
He recalls how two weeks out from final tender for the BEB prototype, Schottel, the company providing Birdon with jets for the boat, said it had signed an agreement with General Dynamics instead. But it was the second underhanded move from a trusted partner where Birdon’s bid almost unravelled. The company had agreed with a manufacturer in Oregon to actually build the BEB.
“They were looking to back us, and we had to pretty quickly establish a record with them, including all our Australian financial records.”“Export Finance Australia provided this finance as access to finance in the US was not an option. Whilst Birdon’s bank, NAB, was extremely supportive of this significant contract, it was confined geographically to dealing with Australian territories and so Birdon approached Export Finance Australia for support,” an EFA spokesman says.
Birdon is expanding into bigger boats. It just bought a 31 acre facility on the water at Portland in Connecticut, and it has other facilities at Bellingham Bay in Washington State, as well as its original locations at Port Macquarie and Dampier in Australia. Birdon’s latest BEB contract is worth up to $545 million and is the first of several major US military contracts in a pipeline of $2.4 billion Birdon is bidding for.
“We had the supplier of heaters tell us they can’t supply us anymore. That’s usually not a big deal, but we have to get any new heaters checked off by the US Army to make sure they are compliant. That takes a lot of time.”