Komatsu - Doing Business in Brisbane

Brisbane Marketing's Investment Attraction division interviews Leo Kalogou, General Manager Mining, about why Komatsu has chosen to invest $55 million (AUD) in a new facility in Brisbane.
TRANSCRIPT
Komatsu Australia are a distributor for Komatsu Global Network. We distribute construction utility and mining equipment throughout Australia and have recently opened this new facility at here at Wacol in Brisbane. We distribute for mining down to construction utility equipment and the mining equipment we distribute as big as 400 tonne class mining trucks and we also distribute smaller utility equipment down to three tonne excavators. This Brisbane office is the national office for our mining divisions, and the reason why we have situated in Brisbane is because most of the major mining houses are based in Brisbane, so it makes sense for us geographically to be also based here close to our customers.
As we have seen there has been infrastructure growth within Queensland and with the mining boom it enables us to service that boom and infrastructure boom with a lot of construction equipment as well.
We have a full laboratory here, it's an oil test laboratory for our customers. So customers will send samples from all throughout Queensland and even in New South Wales to this Brisbane facility where we have a science lab that tests those oil samples that tells them how their machines are operating, whether they're using their machines correctly and whether components need to be changed out on those machines.
The facility also has a remanufacturing centre here and it is one of the first remanufacturing centres that Komatsu have started for electric motors. It's a very specialised field and we're enabled to do that because of the labour we can pool from the Brisbane trades because Brisbane is an attractive place to live and a lot of young apprentices like to start their time here in Brisbane. The cost of living is a lot lower than Perth and Sydney and a lot of people are still moving to the Sunshine State and Brisbane being the capital is the most attractive place to work. Our access to apprentices is also beneficial because we work with Queensland TAFE. We have recently put on 100 apprentices across the country and majority of those apprentices are coming to Brisbane.
Some of our customers are in very remote locations in central Queensland or northern Queensland and access to airport quickly is really a benefit for us. So this facility and the Brisbane arterial roads that we use to get to the airport is a great benefit to us.
Brisbane is also melting pot for culture and we are seeing that really embraced with the festivals we have here in September, which is the summer festivals of Brisbane. You see that cultural diversity within the city. I think that attracts a lot of people. The demand for people in the mining and construction sector is very high and the ability to attract them to a nice city is a huge benefit to our business.