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CM travelled to Aberdeen to visit one successful, independent operator

24th March 2011, Page 38
24th March 2011
Page 38
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Page 38, 24th March 2011 — CM travelled to Aberdeen to visit one successful, independent operator
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Keywords : Leiths Group, Volvo

that is continuing to invest in vehicles and plant despite the economic gloom. The Leiths Group of companies started in the early 1970s, although the family has an association with the quarrying and construction industries stretching back to the 19th century.

Ian Leith is the chairman, and his great grandfather bought his irst granite quarry in the Aberdeen area 136 years ago. This predecessor of the current main Leiths quarry at Cove supplied materials to many major Scottish civil engineering projects of the day.

Leith says: “We started up with just a second-hand tipper in the early 1970s and took on our irst quarrying operation a few years later. It was an old stonemason’s quarry, which contained about 70,000 tonnes of pinnings or waste stone product. In fact, the quarry had been owned by my great grandfather, so we were buying back material that had, in effect, been created by him in the 19th century. We processed it and sold it on almost 100 years later.” In 1977, a local farmer offered Leiths the lease to a hill on land that came with extant planning permission for a quarry. This subsequently became the Blackhills quarry at Cove where Leiths’ modern head ofice is located.

“We have always owned our own workshops and we moved them to a yard at Cove in 1993 and have expanded from there,” says Leith.

The family-owned business now produces more than one million tonnes of aggregates a year, plus asphalt from seven coated stone plants, and operates 16 quarries across Scotland from the Isle of Skye in the west to Ayrshire in the south and Dufftown, Aberlour and Aberdeen in the north-east.

To give some idea of the scale of the company’s operation, which started out 40 years ago with one man and a second-hand truck, there are now about 500 employees and an annual turnover of almost £60m.

The Leiths Group continues to expand its operations, and since 2010 has bought a signiicant interest in Alexander Ross & Sons (Sand and Gravel) of Inverness. Leith welcomes this well-known and respected northern Scotland quarry operator into the Leiths Group. “The purchase of this interest in Alexander Ross & Sons represents a further step in our objective to invest in strategic mineral operations throughout Scotland. We look forward to assisting the management and the team at Alexander Ross in the development of the business, which has an excellent strategic position next to the A9 trunk road.”

Truck talk

If the vehicles in the Markon road marking division are included, Leiths operates about 130 trucks. It is also a major user of Volvo and Caterpillar construction equipment, operating about 35 loading shovels, 360-degree excavators and artic dumpers. The four divisions of Leiths Group, which includes Lawrie Demolition, sand and gravel supplier Joss and the aforementioned Markon, operate a diverse range of construction truck types and makes depending on their duties.

For example, ready-mixed concrete tends to be delivered using MercedesBenz’s sixand eight-wheeled truck mixers, depending on the size of the pour and its distance from the batching plant. Other makes in the Leiths leet include DAF and Hino. Joss works predominantly out of the Lochhills quarry between Dyce and Bridge of Don and the Nether Park quarry at Drumoak on Deeside, so Leiths favours the services of dealer Norscot Truck and Van for its proximity to Bridge of Don. The Hinos in the tipper leet were supplied by Baillie Brothers at Elgin.

It is testimony to the importance that operators in the north-east and north of Scotland place on the relationships they develop with their supplying truck dealers that the Baillie Bros dealership is more than 70 miles north-west of Aberdeen.

Leiths also operates four three-year-old Hinos on the tipper leet, which Leith says are solidly reliable and tough vehicles. The tipper leet, he adds, comprises 70% eight-wheelers with the balance mostly six-wheelers and a handful of four-wheelers.

Leiths’ latest acquisition is four new Volvo FMX 8x4 tippers. Leith invited CM to preview them, as Volvo’s driver development representatives spent the day working with the company’s drivers as part of a familiarisation and hand-over programme.

The FMX is Volvo’s dedicated construction truck. Launched in autumn 2010, deliveries of bodied trucks are now under way and these were the irst to be seen in north-east Scotland. They replace four Foden Alpha 3000 Series, which Leiths had operated from new since 1999 and 2000. They were the straight front-axle models, speciied with CAT C10 powerplants. They were supplied by Charles Lawie, until recently the Foden dealer for the Aberdeen area and a man much respected by his customers for his can-do spirit when helping them sort out truck-related technical problems.

Right for the job

Leith says he irst saw the FMX on the Volvo Truck and Bus Centre North & Scotland stand at the 2010 Black Isle Show at Muir of Ord in August 2010. “I thought it was a good-looking truck that was right for the job,” he says, and placed the order for four a month later.

The trucks were ordered from Volvo’s Aberdeen dealership in Portlethen, only a few minutes’ drive from Leiths’ HQ at Cove. The company has apparently had good experience with the irst Volvo in the Leiths tipper leet. It is a 53-plate, FM-340 eight-wheel tipper, although the wholly-owned Markon and Joss divisional leets also operate Volvos.

“The FM has proven to be reliable,” says Leith, “and the FMX price was competitive compared to other manufacturers that quoted.” Interestingly, Leiths speciied all four FMXs with sleeper cabs because, says Leith, they will be used on contracts all over Scotland to haul asphalt, stone and aggregates from company-owned quarries to customers and road surfacing projects.

“They will go wherever in Scotland the work is, including the Isle of Skye, where we have a quarry. The work will mainly be in the north.” Leiths’ FMXs were also specced with Volvo’s 11-litre D11C engine rated at 410hp. The 11-litre is proving to be a payload-friendly choice, with its useful weight saving of about 140kg over the 13-litre, and there is little in the way of performance difference compared with Volvo’s 13-litre with 1950Nm of torque available across a wide spread. Volvo claims that 95% of maximum torque is available between 1,050rpm and 1,500rpm.

The FMX’s engine brake should also prove effective in the Highlands because the Volvo VEB delivers 290kW of braking effort when speciied in the 11-litre engine, comparing favourably with the 300kW generated when installed in the 13-litre. Choice of rear suspension is Volvo’s tried-and-tested B-Ride two-spring bogie.

Investment

The past two years have been as dificult a time for Leiths Group as any other business in the construction industry. However, Leith emphasises that although the recession “puts the others in the shade”, the company has reduced its exposure to bad credit risk and continues to invest in developing the business and updating trucks and machinery to keep the leet modern, more productive and fuel eficient.

A signiicant proportion of business comes from tenders via the Scottish government, local authorities and large civil engineering companies, for road surfacing, refurbishment and building projects. The company recently invested in a new asphalt plant near Edinburgh and the construction of a new depot for Markon close to the motorway network at Cumbernauld in the Central Belt. It is also hoping for a favourable planning decision regarding the proposed 28-mile A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. The plans are going through the inal challenges at the Court of Session in Edinburgh.

All things being equal and given that the four new Volvo FMX eight-wheelers are undoubtedly more fuel eficient and likely to be signiicantly more productive than the vehicles they replace, it appears that, despite the economic uncertainty, now is as good a time as any for Leiths to invest in new trucks. ■


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