IN October 1971, The Border Mail welcomed Borg-Warner to Lavington when the company transferred a large part of its gearbox manufacturing division from Sydney to a new site on Kaitlers Road.
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Its editorial on the day the plant opened said it would be ideally situated between major markets in Sydney and Melbourne and a suitable workforce had been secured on the Border.
There were hopes the new plant would grow at Lavington over many years, with plans to expand Borg-Warner’s export markets into the Pacific and Asia.
A little more than a decade on, in 1982, Borg-Warner realised those plans for growth with a workforce peaking at 1251, making it the city’s largest employer.
The plant was training hundreds of apprentices, with many of those tradespeople going on to establish their own successful businesses on the Border.
Borg-Warner was also supporting dozens of local suppliers and services and the company and its workers were generous sponsors of local sports and charities.
When BTR Nylex bought the plant in 1987, renaming it BTR Automotive, it was also able to operate the business successfully for another 15 years.
But the tide changed when ION Ltd bought the factory in 2002.
In 2004 ION made 150 employees redundant before its parent group collapsed, owing $550 million to banks and 500 other creditors.
The company’s liquidators kept the factory operating but kept reducing staff numbers.
The workforce continued to shrink when a new company, Drivetrain Systems International, bought the business in 2006.
It collapsed in 2009, was placed in receivership and later sold to the Chinese company, Geely Automotive, but not before the workforce was further reduced to just 131 employees.
Geely had contracts with some of the emerging vehicle makers in Asia — SsangYong and Mahindra — allowing the company to rebuild employee numbers but there were further cutbacks in 2010-11 when orders began to decline.
The writing was on the wall for DSI’s eventual demise when Geely opened a new gearbox factory in China in 2012, capable of manufacturing 300,000 units annually.
When it became clear there would be no replacement orders when the SsangYong contract expires in October, Geely decided it was time to come clean, consigning DSI and its proud history of Border manufacturing to the history books.
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