MANUFACTURING

Manufacturing businesses need finance structured around equipment cycles, supply chain timing, and production capacity, not one-size-fits-all business loans. We arrange plant and equipment finance, trade and supply chain finance, and working capital facilities built around your production and delivery cycles. Alasdair and Glenclair Financial are proud members of the Southern Strength Manufacturing network, giving us direct insight into the real challenges facing Australian manufacturers and the lenders who genuinely understand the sector.

Australian manufacturers carry capital-intensive balance sheets and long cash cycles, buying raw materials and components, often imported, well before finished goods are invoiced and paid. Finance has to cover three things at once: plant and equipment, the working-capital gap, and sometimes the factory itself. Equipment is funded by chattel mortgage or lease, with tax treatment such as the instant asset write-off (and, in prior years, temporary full expensing) shaping the buy-versus-lease decision, and lenders assess the make, expected life, ease of resale and whether the asset is general-purpose or bespoke. Sale-and-leaseback of an owned factory can release trapped equity for a growth project without diluting ownership.

Lenders look at customer and supply-chain concentration, exposure to energy prices as a material and rising input for many plants, the AUD for both imported inputs and export competitiveness, and any anti-dumping or tariff protection on the product line. Programs such as the Industry Growth Program and advanced-manufacturing and defence-supply initiatives can sit alongside senior debt. Order books, work-in-progress and the length of the production run determine how much working capital is really needed. We package the equipment schedule, a cash-flow model that reflects the true production-to-payment lag, and the order pipeline, then tender across asset-finance specialists, trading banks and non-banks, comparing rate, balloon and term against asset life, working-capital limits that flex with the order book, and whether the lender will avoid cross-securing the equipment, the debtors and the premises into one facility.