EXPORTING
Innovation drives export success
Company: Unasco
Product: Domestic Factoring Facility

Specific Business Needs
• Working capital
• Funding for exports
• Cashflow management

Unasco started as a small family concern in the 1930s in the housing and roofing industry and weathered many storms before re-engineering itself in the 1960s and 70s as a successful, globally competitive manufacturer.

It is now one of Australia’s largest privately owned engineering plastics manufacturers and the only manufacturer of Teflon tape, which it exports to the US, Asia and Europe. It produces plastics seals and bearings for the automotive industry and extrudes plastic for the defence force and many other industrial applications.

Unasco is also involved in the Australian manufacture and development of fibre optics technology, which is used to illuminate buildings, swimming pools and mines.

Its co-owner, Bill Bentley, inherited the business with his brothers Dick and Paul from his father and his grandfather before him, and has employed a rare mix of intuition, experience and true grit to steer the company through the challenges of the past 70 years.

Unasco approached Scottish Pacific Business Finance many years ago primarily to help launch its exporting business. It chose to use the strong sales from its domestic business as security for its factoring facility.

"Once the marketplace reached saturation in Australia, we knew there was a lot of money to be made overseas," says Bill. "We were struggling because it took so long to get the product together in the big container loads, ship them overseas and then to get paid. We did not have enough money to fund that time lag so we decided to use the Factoring Facility offered by Scottish Pacific.

"It allowed us to pull cash in for the business until the money came back from overseas."

Unasco’s chief financial officer David Newman says the company entered Factoring before it became popular but since that time, the business had grown ten-fold.

"Bill believed Scottish Pacific were there to help us and they have helped us in many ways over the years," says David. "They were a great help when GST was introduced.

"Bill was always of the ethos that if you had a quid in the bank, you should buy something and sell it – quick. But when the GST was introduced, we could see that shaping up as a cashflow recipe for disaster, so we asked Scottish Pacific to be our piggy bank, keeping the GST and PAYG in reserve and to manage the cheques."