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The last few ACS employees work at finishing ołl the finał run of appliance controller to go through the factory, before everythlng was packed up for shipping to Slngapore. Two days later they had to be put off, although a smali number went to Singapore with the machlnery, to train staff.

wasn’t much option; it was either go ahead, or cali it a day. So things went ahead. By now the Larscns* sharehold-ing in Macro Rcsources/ACS had bccn whittled down from about 80% to less than 30%, and the company was morc in hock than ever before . . .

Then a month or two down the track, one of the investment company direc-tors announced at a board meeting that his company could no longcr afford to support ACS and its debt. Almost before you could say “appliance control-lers”, one of the banks had placed ACS into rcceivcrship. They weren’t willing to wait until ACS could mcet sonie of those orders, ship some controllers and trade out of its debts.

Ali that could be done was to seek a buycr for the manufacturing plant — and that buycr happened to be Mr Mat-thew Goh, the very successful Singa-pore-based entrepreneur. Needlcss to say Mr Goh had no trouble finding in-vestors in Singapore to finance the dcal. Nor did he have any shortage of help from the Singapore Government, in the way of things like tax concessions or grants to cover training of pcople in Singapore by ACS’s experts. They’re kccn to nurture manufacturing/ in dcvcloping countries . . .

The nett result is that ACS is gone, and Australia has lost yet another rcally promising hi-tech manufacturing company. Ali those orders are now going to bć met by Mr Goh’s company in Singapore, using the technology developcd herc by Laurie Larsen before he sought advicc from the professionals.

Mr Goh has been able to acquire a good investment: a complete hi-tech clectronics plant, plus a healthy order book to match. Good luck to him. But it makes you wonder, when a so-called “developed^M country like Australia can’t nurture its manufacturing indus-tries, and they have to be sold off to a “devcloping” country like Singapore. If

I were Mr Goh, I’d find this pretty ironie.

As for Laurie and Greg Larsen, they haven*t given up. They’rc hoping to set up a new company, to continue the in-novative R&D work that they began at ACS. But this time, they’11 be staying well elear of the money lenders. ^

Even this cute little ASEA robot arm went to Singapore, too. It had the boring job of transferring PCBs to the wave soldering linę.

ELECTRONICS Australia, September 1987    23