Supashock

Supashock is an Adelaide engineering business that grew out of motorsport damper work and ended up building running gear for armoured vehicles. It was founded in 2005. Rheinmetall bought a 49 per cent shareholding in July 2017, which opened a global vehicle supply chain without handing over control of the company, and headcount has since passed 100 across sites in Australia and the United States. Design, validation, testing and manufacture all happen in the one South Australian facility, which is why prototypes move to production quickly.

Defence is the segment that made the name outside Australia. Supashock designed, tested and now manufactures the running gear for Rheinmetall's Lynx KF41 tracked infantry fighting vehicle, a suspension system for a heavy tracked platform built and assembled in South Australia. It developed a modular retractable anti-tank guided missile launcher, in service on the Lynx KF41 and offered for the Boxer 8x8, which folds away so the launcher survives the vibration and shock of cross-country movement instead of riding exposed. The Automated Load Handling System, unveiled jointly with Rheinmetall, lets a single crew member load and unload ISO containers, modules and flat racks from the safety of the cab. Rheinmetall and Supashock unveiled that system together in June 2018. One operator, one cab, no exposure. Retractable artillery turret interface stabilisers steady Rheinmetall's HX3 10x10 self-propelled wheeled howitzer as it fires. A retractable crane for the Lynx completes the vehicle-mounted family. Each of those products came out of the same pattern, a mechanical problem on a vehicle that nobody had solved neatly, handed to a shop that could design, test and build the answer without subcontracting the middle steps.

The other segments are civilian and they are what the workshop was built on. OEM suspension supplies vehicle manufacturers directly, motorsport dampers remain a line of business, and the aftermarket and 4x4 ranges are sold through a separate retail channel. Mining customers take suspension and structural products for heavy equipment, and general commercial engineering work sits alongside. Volumes there are small and the tolerances are not, which suits a shop built around validation. American operations extend the same offering into a second defence market. Underneath all of it is one set of capabilities covering engineering, computer aided engineering, testing, manufacturing, quality and cyber security. Contract services include CNC machining, sheetmetal work, welding and fabrication, industrial painting, 3D printing, 3D scanning, and testing, verification and validation. Export orders and Land 400 Phase 2 work arrived close together, which is unusual for an Australian business of this size, and the pattern since has been consistent: a component developed for one Rheinmetall platform gets offered across the rest of the range, then sold into other markets from Adelaide.