PERTH-BASED surveying and mapping firm McMullen Nolan says it will use the acquisition of mid-tier surveyor DM Gerloff & Associates to build its business outside of metropolitan land development and expand its capabilities of servicing mining and resource
PERTH-BASED surveying and mapping firm McMullen Nolan says it will use the acquisition of mid-tier surveyor DM Gerloff & Associates to build its business outside of metropolitan land development and expand its capabilities of servicing mining and resources clients.
McMullen Nolan announced last week it had bought DM Gerloff & Associates, whose primary market is in Port Hedland providing land-surveying services for BHP Billiton.
The acquisition of Gerloffs grows the McMullen Nolan team to more than 120 qualified surveying staff in Western Australia.
McMullen Nolan chairman, John McMullen, said a focus for the company was to pursue opportunities outside of its core business of metropolitan land development.
“We’ve always had a presence in Newman supplying surveyors to BHP on their Whaleback minesite and that’s been good,” Mr McMullen told WA Business News.
“Gerloffs was a surveying company that operated primarily at the other end of the line down in Port Hedland, so we just thought it was a natural progression to go there.
“We’re now working for BHP where they dig it out of the ground and now down the other end where they ship it out, so there just seemed to be a lot of synergies there for us.”
Mr McMullen said along with the acquisition of Gerloffs and the regional focus, McMullen Nolan would also be looking to boost its share of the metropolitan land survey market.
“Typically we’ve got almost 40 per cent of the land survey market here, and it will continue to grow, but we’re not too sure realistically how much we can expect to continue to increase that,” he said.
“There are some exciting projects coming up in land development, especially in the northern corridor of Perth that we’re currently involved in that we hope to maintain, and we’re just expanding into some of the mining areas where we haven’t been.
“We’re certainly not cutting back on our urban land development work, but we do want to grow and one of the biggest areas of growth that we see at the minute is the mining and resources sector.”
The acquisition announcement and growth strategy comes at the same time McMullen Nolan announced it was seeking partners for the development of mobile laser scanning solutions for the precision engineering market.
“We view our mobile laser scanning solution in a similar way that aerial photography companies have traditionally operated,” Mr McMullen said.
“This involves the approach of offering the service to other surveying and mapping companies who have typically found it difficult to afford these types of systems.
“We have identified a great opportunity to work with these companies as service providers, with the key benefit for them being the additional survey and processing opportunities they will be able to generate as a result of having access to these new systems.”
