Fulton Hogan strengthens inroads in Australia

Four years after entering the concrete market, New Zealand construction firm Fulton Hogan is set to take a 50% share of NSW company Stabilised Pavements of Australia.

Stabilised Pavements Australia (SPA) was started in 1984 and specialises in road recycling, sustainability solutions, building, repairing and maintaining pavements. Fulton Hogan staff were told in an email last week that the company was negotiating the SPA purchase, the Australian Financial Review has reported. SPA has previously been a contractor of the NZ firm.

Fulton Hogan has been steadily making inroads into Australia since 2000 when it acquired Standard Roads Civil Engineering and Astec Australia, which at the time represented a “step change” in the size of its operations here.

In 2018, the company entered the concrete market with the acquisition of Stevenson’s four ready-mix plants, Drury quarry and laboratory business, and followed this up with a new plant at the quarry in 2020.

Fulton Hogan recently completed a large concrete project in Auckland, the 210 metre-long busway bridge over the Tamaki River. Technical innovation in the project included the bridge’s pile caps that were built from the water. The company designed a special boat that was used as a prefabricated floating formwork for installing the piles. The bridge structure was then cantilevered in four launch phases, driven out over the river on hydraulic jacks and rollers.

That’s a long way from the original Fulton Hogan partnership started in 1933 between Jules Fulton and Bob Hogan in Dunedin on the way to a repair job in Mosgiel, 15 km west of the city. They bought an old Boothmac sprayer for £5 and towed a bitumen kettle behind Hogan’s Willys-Knight car. The company now employs over 7800 people in Australia and New Zealand and will celebrate its 90th anniversary in 2023.

Image source: SPA

About the author

Desi Corbett

Desi is the Editor of Concrete in Australia and at the helm of our magazine for 8 years. She was behind the Institute's weekly news bulletins from 2016-2021 and is now writing our focused news items. Desi has been an engineering news and features journalist/editor across all disciplines since 2013 - part of a 30-year career writing for a wide range of industries.