NOJA Power managing director Neil O’Sullivan. Picture: David Clark
NOJA Power, a manufacturer started in an electrical engineer’s home more than two decades ago, is on the block with a sale or initial public offering that could value the company at as much as $1.3bn.
NOJA Power, which exports electrical switches around the world, last year attracted a $62m investment from Ellerston Capital, the former investment vehicle for the Packer family.
NOJA co-founder and managing director Neil O’Sullivan said that investment was a precursor to the company’s next stage of development, as some of the original partners retired.
NOJA has appointed Ellerston Capital Solutions, the M&A arm of Ellerston, and US investment banker Harris Williams as joint lead managers of a sale process.
“We’re not sure fully what that process will be yet, but it’s going to start in January and it might be a trade sale or an IPO,” Mr O’Sullivan said. “I think either way I’ll likely stay involved.”
Estimates are that NOJA, which is tipped to turn over $210m in the 2025 financial year, could be valued at as much as $1.3bn.
Mr O’Sullivan, together with fellow executives Oleg Samarski, Jay Manne and Quynh Anh Le, has turned a fledgling business started in his Brisbane home in 2002 into a billion-dollar global exporter. Together, the first letters of their names form the word NOJA.
“I thought we always had potential,” said Mr O’Sullivan, who studied electrical engineering at the Queensland Institute of Technology in the early 1980s.
“When you start a business, all you’re concerned about in the first year is how you’re going to fund it. I worked for free for the first year and step by step it grew to what it is today,” he said as he inspected the sprawling NOJA factory stacked with boxes bound for Brazil, Rwanda and Vietnam.
Inside the boxes are brand new electrical recloser switches – think of them as a home safety switch on steroids – that are destined to keep the lights on at major power networks.
A recloser is an automatic, high-voltage electric switch that shuts off electric power when a short circuit occurs.
Neil O’Sullivan says global growth will continue.
“Our products are used to detect faults on overhead lines,” Mr O’Sullivan said.
“About 80 per cent of faults can be cured by opening and closing the line. Those faults might be caused by lightning strikes, they might be caused by birds or animals or tree branches, or sometimes wind just making the lines clash together.
“If you’ve experienced sitting in your lounge room during a storm and you see the lights dim and come back up again, that was one of our switches operating. If it had not been there, there would have been a blackout.”
Mr O’Sullivan said the success of any manufacturing business – wherever it was located in the world – was scale.
“Because we are addressing a global market and more than 90 per cent of our income comes from exports, we’ve got the volume,” he said. “The second thing is you have to globally source. We receive our parts from all over the world and we sell our products all over the world.”
He said NOJA also owned all the intellectual property to its growing range of products.
Mr O’Sullivan said he supported the federal government’s Future Made in Australia push, but was disappointed “that it hasn’t moved at the speed I thought it should have”.
NOJA is about to expand manufacturing at its Brisbane headquarters, where it employs 350 people, to produce a new proprietary product called EcoLink that could help reduce bushfires.
Mr O’Sullivan said the royal commission into the disastrous 2009 bushfires in Victoria blamed certain kinds of fuses on the power network for starting some of the blazes.
“These fuses would blow and sometimes drop on the ground and cause a fire,” he said. NOJA Power’s EcoLink is a circuit breaker that goes inside the fuse to prevent it dropping on the ground.
“We’re selling them for $3000 each and we’re expecting to sell literally millions of them over the coming years,” he said.
Mr O’Sullivan said NOJA, which was named Queensland Exporter of the Year in 2024, would continue its global focus in the years ahead.
“A business like ours is all based on the back order book,” he said. “How big is the back order book? How much work do we have in front of us?
“At present we are growing at levels of 30-40 per cent per annum. There’s been times when that’s consolidated, but consistently we’ve had high growth.
“We are just about to put on another 20 people and I am proud to say we’ve never had to lay off a single person for lack of work in 24 years.”