Boat maker hit with huge jump in aluminium prices

Booral, Queensland-based Specmar Marine cuts and supplies pre-cut plate alloy boat packages ranging from 4.2 to 9.5 metres to boatbuilders who then weld them together in the final form.

However, Specmar’s parent company in the US recently received a complaint from a customer wanting to know why a newly supplied kit for a 1650kg Specmar 949, one of the boat maker’s most popular landing craft designs, had risen by $6000 – a 20 per cent increase.

Specmar said its main cost had been a rise in the price of aluminium used to make its kit boats, which was now $2.30 a kilogram higher than it was seven months ago. 

“We are all painfully aware of the rising aluminium prices globally,” it said in a statement issued on the company’s Facebook page.

“The 5300mm Specmar 620 … has gone up $890 in the last three months, and there is a predicted 60-cent rise [in the per-kilogram price of aluminium] next month,” it said. 

“It’s never easy to tell potential and existing clients of these changes.”

Specmar said Australia’s alloy boat industry was facing difficult times “and coming to grips with the instability in pricing, which no one can escape”.

“Please be mindful of comments and complaints as we are a small industry and false claims can affect not only us but the whole boat-building industry.”

Boatsales.com.au asked Telwater, Australia’s largest aluminium boat maker and responsible for around three in every five new boats sold here, if the rising cost of aluminium was having an impact on its prices.

A spokesperson for Telwater said it was “committed to making boating accessible for all consumers as it continues to provide products at an attainable price within the wider market".