Bisalloy Steel Group

Bisalloy Steel Group is the only company that quenches and tempers steel plate in Australia, which is why its name turns up in armour specifications for vehicles it otherwise has nothing to do with. The company was founded in 1980 and still runs its mill at Unanderra, south of Wollongong. It is listed on the ASX and reported revenue of about A$153 million in the 2025 financial year. The group takes in Bisalloy Steels in Australia, majority owned distribution businesses in Indonesia and Thailand, and a co-operative joint venture in China that gives it a route into Asian volumes.

Four branded plate families do the work. BISALLOY Wear is abrasion resistant plate for dump truck bodies, hoppers, chutes and bins, and it feeds mining and earthmoving and mineral processing customers, the largest part of the order book. BISALLOY Structural is high tensile plate that saves weight in overhead cranes, forklift frames, transport equipment and construction. BISALLOY Armour is the defence grade, specified for the hulls of armoured personnel carriers, light armoured vehicles and the Bushmaster protected mobility vehicle, and for the Collins-class submarines, whose hulls were the first submarine hulls built in Australia. BISALLOY Protection is the civil counterpart, covering safes, cash-in-transit vehicles, and land and sea patrol craft. Grades sell on hardness and impact performance rather than on brand alone, so each of the four families spans several numbered products.

Defence work has moved from supply into joint development. Thales selected Bisalloy in 2017 to armour the Australian Army's planned fleet of more than 1,100 Hawkei protected vehicles. A teaming agreement with Rheinmetall has produced specialised armour grades for the Boxer combat reconnaissance vehicle, qualified both for Australian production and as a source of supply back into Rheinmetall in Germany, and the plate has met German certification standards. That matters more than any single order, because armour steel sells on ballistic test data and qualification rather than on price.

The remaining segments are the ordinary industrial ones the mill was built to feed. Agriculture takes wear plate for ground engaging equipment. Engineering and fabrication shops buy across all four ranges, and construction takes the structural grades. Protection covers the non-defence security market, where the buyer wants a rated plate rather than a certified armour standard. Alongside the steel itself the company sells heat treatment knowledge, welding guidance and specification support, since quenched and tempered plate behaves differently under a welder than mild steel does, and a fabricator who gets that wrong tends to blame the plate rather than the procedure. Exports reach Asia, the Middle East, Europe, North America and South America through distributors, agents and direct supply to original equipment manufacturers. That spread matters for a single-mill business.