Multiplex Says Japanese Takeover Won’t Change What Makes it Tick

The near-billion-dollar sale of Perth-founded builder Multiplex to an even bigger Japanese group will not change the Aussie firm’s culture, its director in the West says. “Western Australia could not be more embedded in the company,” Multiplex regional managing director for Western Australia Chris Palandri emphatically tells The Urban Developer . “Multiplex has been around for 64 years. “It started in Western Australia; what we grabbed from [founder] John Roberts’ Multiplex culture was the [ethos of the] family business.” Palandri says Multiplex global chief executive John Flecker has been with the firm for 39 years and still lives in WA. “Even though we’ve been owned by Brookfield ... they didn’t try to change our culture or our business,” he says. “They just let us get on with it, so we managed to maintain that culture.” ‘A much more natural place for Multiplex’ In a deal worth $924 million to be finalised by the end of 2026, Brookfield will sell Multiplex to Japanese construction colossus Obayashi Corporation . Palandri says Brookfield has been “a really good supportive owner, but they aren’t builders”. “Obayashi’s a builder, so it’s a much more natural place for Multiplex to have our long-term home,” he says. “They’re not looking to come and change Multiplex; they’re not changing the management, they’re not changing the systems, they’re not changing the culture.” Down through the decades, Multiplex has led major projects across much of the western world, including working with Obayashi in the late 1990s to build the Sydney Olympic Stadium. ▲ Multiplex and Obayashi collaborated on the Sydney Olympic Stadium ahead of the 2000 Olympics. Image of Chris Palandri at top: Chris Thomson At the 19-storey Epiisod student housing tower Multiplex is building for Centurion in the western Perth suburb of Nedlands , Palandri says many modern methods of construction spoken about today are just combinations of techniques employed well before the 2000 Sydney Olympics. “What happens is that when the market gets busy like it is, and when people are looking for more cost-effective ways of delivering things ... everyone turns to how can we do things more efficiently,” he says. “When things like bathroom pods come up, we go: ‘Oh, okay, bathroom pods have been going on since 1990, when we were doing Central Park’.” Completed in 1993, the 51-storey Central Park office tower is WA’s tallest building. It was built using a modular method—more than 60,000sq m of floor units were precast off-site and dropped into the skyscraper’s steel frame. ▲ Multiplex completed WA's tallest building, Central Park, in 1993. Palandri says the Central Park project incorporated precast planks with a topping. “Things like bathroom pods, precast planks and topping on top, everyone would call that modern methods of construction,” he says “It’s just that you need a bunch of things to come together to make modern methods of construction, in whatever form.” Benefits of teaming up early Those types of things are coming together at the 513-bed Epiisod tower that is rising on Stirling Highway, 600m west of the main limestone campus of The University of Western Australia. Palandri says the under-construction project will have 500 bathroom pods that are all the same. The pods were made in Sydney and the project’s 250 precast columns were made in Perth. “The key ingredient is you need to come together with a contractor early enough with your design team ... because you’ve got to have certain heights and access into the building and all those sorts of things,” he says. ▲ A rendering of the Epiisod student housing tower designed by DMG Architecture now rising on Stirling Highway at Nedlands. He says that, for commercial office tower projects, Multiplex fabricates services risers off site in very long sections, drops them into the top of buildings then pulls them together. “It doesn’t always work because of the style of building you have but we’re always looking at fabricating as much offsite as we possibly can and then bringing it on to site,” he says. “We’ve also done quite a lot of, as other examples of [let’s] call it modern methods of construction, things like central energy plants that are built off-site and brought in sections and assembled on site and connected into the building.” Palandri says the fascination with modern methods of construction that has snowballed since Covid will precipitate uptake of such things as the digitisation of design and more efficient use of materials. “And there’s a lot of it going on,” he says. “It’s not a simple exercise because the problem is that none of our buildings are the same. “Every single building we design is different.”

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Chris Thomson
Wed 14 Oct 26

Multiplex Says Japanese Takeover Won’t Change What Makes it Tick

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