The Stokes family own 70 per cent of Boral, which has sold off about $4 billion in assets in North America to focus on the core Australian business, which has been battling falling profits as fuel costs jump and wet weather causes construction disruptions.
Boral is also going through a heavy cost-cutting program under the “Project Next” banner, where it worked with consulting group PwC to prune hundreds of jobs.
‘Concrete is a last-minute order’
Boral set up the Found Concrete marketplace business when it partnered with Fusion Labs to develop the platform technology. Fusion Labs is now part of Deloitte. Boral owns 100 per cent of Found Concrete.
Mr McArthur said almost 30 per cent of orders were made outside business hours as various parts of a construction process, which have a lot of interdependent stages, finally fell into place.
“Concrete is a last-minute order,” he said. Once concrete is in a truck it needs to be delivered and poured within an hour or two.
Trades people and building company operators traditionally made phone calls to order concrete but now were increasingly using the digital marketplace set up by Found Concrete. “It’s been a real shift,” he said.
Smaller operators that were often left behind in the early morning rush to order concrete, were able to lock in a delivery with certainty.
He said Found Concrete wanted to go national and have a presence in all major markets around Australia.
Boral chief executive Zlatko Todorcevski said there was plenty of upside in expanding into other materials besides concrete for Found Concrete.
Now that it was accelerating in a rapid scale-up phase, where volume growth, customer acquisition and customer retention were the focus, it was better off in the hands of a new owner, he said.
Mr Todorcevski is leaving the top job at Boral by December, to be replaced by Vik Bansal, chief executive of steel company InfraBuild.
Mr Bansal left Australia’s largest waste management group, Cleanaway, 17 months ago in the wake of bullying allegations.
For the past year, he has been running steel group InfraBuild, part of the global GFG Alliance owned by British billionaire Sanjeev Gupta, who is still trying to refinance about $6 billion in funding across the broader GFG that had previously stemmed from Greensill Capital.
Greensill Capital collapsed early last year.
