About NDA Group
NDA’s origins are firmly rooted in the New Zealand dairy industry, where it can trace its history back to 1894 as a co-operative established to supply the diverse needs of the country’s important primary sector. Initially based in Hawera in the centre of New Zealand’s North Island, NDA was the source of many products for the farming industry, from gumboots to tea leaves.
By the 1950s, the company had moved into the fabrication of high precision stainless steel vessels and vats for the New Zealand dairy industry. This was to be the product focus on which the future success of the Group would be built.
NDA’s co-operative ownership structure altered several times until in 1998, then CEO Gary Mollard led a management buyout by a team convinced that the strategic future of the group lay in taking its highly engineered specialist products global.
Growth was rapid. In 2001, NDA acquired 50% of Dairy Technology Services (DTS), a company strongly focused on on-farm sales and service of leading edge refrigeration equipment and telemetry produced for the stainless steel vats and vessels manufactured by NDA.
The first major step towards globalization occurred in 2006 when NDA acquired a majority share of an existing stainless steel fabrication workshop in Shanghai – an initiative aimed at providing customers with fabrication alternatives while maintaining the NDA link. By October, 2006, Shanghai NDA had moved into a new purpose-built manufacturing workshop, doubling the size of the operation.
With the globalization strategy gaining momentum, the Group began working on a capital restructure to enable further growth. As part of this process it acquired 100% of DTS and the remaining 38% of Shanghai NDA.
Sydney-based RMB Capital Partners acquired 60% of the NDA Group in April, 2007 with the management team retaining 40% ownership of the Group.
Globalisation was again to the fore in July, 2007 when NDA acquired Southern Heat Exchanger Corporation (SHECO) based in Tuscaloosa, Alabama with a service centre in Houston, Texas. SHECO is a market-leading manufacturer of shell and tube heat exchangers for the chemical industry.
In April, 2008 NDA acquired Crown Sheetmetal, a wine and dairy tank specialist fabricator with workshops in Invercargill, New Zealand and Melbourne, Australia. This acquisition also resulted in full ownership of Truform Stainless in Blenheim, New Zealand, another fabricator serving the wine industry previously a joint venture between NDA and Crown Sheetmetal.
The October 2008 acquisition of Pipetech in Adelaide, Australia further strengthened NDA's position in the Australasian market. Pipetech is a specialist in the design and manufacture of pressure vessels for the mining, oil, and gas industries.
