Looking good at 60

Founded in 1948 by a toolmaker, Robt Stone has retained its identity and continues to play a key role in providing complex infrastructure.  BY GAVIN RILEY

It takes a particularly robust and clearly branded company to survive 60 years and three changes of ownership with both its name and logo intact – as Robt Stone has done.

McConnell Dowell, if a little younger, has achieved such a feat, and indeed there are similarities between the two multi-discipline constructors.

Robt Stone, headquartered in Auckland, is one of New Zealand’s largest and most experienced mechanical engineering companies, specialising in project management, mechanical design, fabrication, site construction and maintenance.

Acquired by Tenix Alliance in October last year, it continues to offer its wide-ranging professional skills to a broad range of clients and industry sectors throughout New Zealand, Australia, the Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia.

Tenix Robt Stone (as it is now officially known) will mark its 60th birthday with a dinner in Auckland at the end of November for present and past employees and invited guests. Individual branch celebrations will also be held.

The company was founded by Bob Stone in 1948 with the help of Jim Donald, whom he had met at A&G Price after the war. Stone had begun his working life in his father’s lawnmowing business, was a toolmaker by trade, and was the father of four girls.

Robt Stone & Co’s first job was installing machinery for a British toymaking firm, which was moving its operations from South Africa to New Zealand. For the first two years Stone and Donald lived on site and laboured out of the back of their own truck.

In the early 1950s the pair built their first machine shop in Queens Road, Panmure. They started working with NZ Forest Products and in 1953 built the first paper machine at Kinleith.

A keen boatie, Stone in the 1960s helped the team behind the first Australian America’s Cup challenger, Gretel 1. Although the challenge was unsuccessful, the experience fuelled Stone’s love of sailing and he went on to assist New Zealand’s first Olympic sailing team.

As Robt Stone grew, the workshop was moved to Morrin Road in Glen Innes. Then in the 1970s the company bought Swanson Engineering and transferred the boilermaking shop to New Plymouth.

Around this time Robt Stone expanded its focus from just service-related and plant-maintenance projects to the meat industry and the world of contracting. Its first contract was in a joint venture with Canadian company Combustion Engineering to construct boilers at the new Huntly power station. Other projects included building the first grandstand at Eden Park and work on the Kapuni gas-treatment station, Maui gas plant, Whangarei refinery and Bluff pipeline.

In the late 1970s, Stone sold his business to Steel & Tube, which had been buying shares steadily in the company.

Though Bob Stone died of cancer in 1980, a family connection with Robt Stone remained. His nephew, Geoff Vazey, had joined the company in 1971 with an honours degree in mechanical engineering and by the 1980s was its general manager. Late in that decade he set about winning contracts in Australia and the Pacific Islands for his 500 staff (down from a peak of 900) to compensate for the lean domestic workload which followed the end of the Think Big projects.

Vazey also lent his leadership talents to the Contractors’ Federation, being elected to the Auckland branch executive in 1986 and the national council in 1988, where he proposed that the organisation could recruit many new members from the ranks of mechanical engineering and related contractors.

Before that idea could be developed Vazey resigned from the federation council and Robt Stone to join Ports of Auckland as general manager plant services. He was later to become the port’s chief executive, then (in 2006) its managing director.

Before Vazey retired at the end of August last year he said his work at the port had greatly benefited from the relationships of mutual respect and camaraderie he had established while at Robt Stone with members of some of the country’s toughest unions on the Think Big projects.

(Robt Stone has since supplied Ports of Auckland with another executive – Brian Livingstone, its current project manager. Livingstone joined the port company in 1998 after extensive experience with Robt Stone, first as contracts manager at the Glenbrook steel mill expansion and Wiri oil products terminal, then project manager for the Ohaaki power station, and finally as company operations manager.)

Steel & Tube continued to own Robt Stone for some 20 years before selling it to Ian Murray in 1999. During his eight-year ownership Murray expanded beyond the company’s four North Island bases, and increased its offshore work, by opening offices in Australia in 1999, and Papua New Guinea and Fiji in 2002.

A year ago Murray sold Robt Stone to Tenix Alliance, which has 18 depots in the North Island and is a leading provider of infrastructure and engineering expertise to the water, electricity and gas utility markets in Australasia.

Tenix Alliance has not stood still since the acquisition, which has created an aggregate workforce of 600. Under general manager Craig Brydon, Tenix Robt Stone has recently opened a new workshop near its Penrose head office to support the company’s fabrication and site projects in the Auckland region and operations further afield.

The facility has overhead and swing cranes and has been furnished with tools and equipment to make it a fully operational workshop. With increased growth in the Auckland market, the company says it can now provide close-at-hand pipe spooling, mechanical equipment manufacture, site project support and maintenance resources.

Tenix Robt Stone’s consistent excellence and highly developed specialist expertise mean it continues to work on challenging and complex infrastructural projects similar in nature to those it was carrying out 20 years ago.

In 1988, for instance, two of its achievements included installing the $230 million No 5 recovery boiler at NZ Forest Products’ Kinleith mill and replacing 680 tubes, each weighing nearly 500kg, on the damaged No 2 methanol reformer at NZ Synthetic Fuels Corporation’s gas-to-gasoline plant at Motunui.

Recently the company has been the main mechanical-fabrication and site-construction provider at the Kupe oil and gas field development in South Taranaki; has carried out the hook-up, repair and finishing work for a floating platform storage and offload facility for the Tui oilfield off the Taranaki coast; has designed and constructed cross-country steam-gathering pipelines and supplied the main pressure vessels for Mighty River Power’s Kawerau power station; and has designed, manufactured and installed tee-top pieces with deflector plates to the steam turbine exhaust ducts at Mighty River’s Southdown power station.

Like all long-lasting businesses, Tenix Robt Stone has known tough times. But as long as there is a demand for highly specialised input into complex vital infrastructure, this durable company – the creation of a humble Kiwi toolmaker – will not only survive but thrive. Here’s to its next 60 years.