The Dunedin family company Christie Garden Products and its glasshouses and garden sheds, evolved from foundry J & T Christie which was established in 1881, has been bought for an undisclosed sum by 11-year-old Allan's Sheet Metal and Engineering Services Ltd.
Managing director Allan Whitfield said the company was not a niche-market engineer but offered a varied range of components for other companies, including flues, coal and pellet-fired boilers, handrails, chemical sheds and shelving, stainless steel benching and dairy shed components.
Prototypes for Fisher and Paykel, other customers and in-house developments are also under way.
"Christies' complements the machinery we are already using. We'll be able to modernise the production side for manufacturing more of their quality products," Mr Whitfield said yesterday.
He has built up the sheet metal business from a one-man, garage-based operation to 18 employees working from Otaki St, having bought the first laser profile cutter in Dunedin and invested in several programmable heavy-duty sheet metal "turret cutters", capable of stamping out tens of thousands of intricate designs with minimal supervision by staff.
As yet, Christies' liquidators are unable to determine whether a dividend will be available for any of its 46 creditors, who are collectively owed almost $600,000.
Mr Whitfield said his company had taken on the completion of customer orders already paid for before the liquidation. While negotiations were still under way with liquidators on some aspects of the purchase, some of the "dinosaur" sheet metal working machinery would be sold or disposed of separately.
The business was placed in voluntary liquidation by owner David Christie seven weeks ago and taken over by Insolvency Management Ltd, which has recently filed its first report.
Liquidator Gus Jenkins said yesterday there were six known secured creditors, with interests registered on the Personal Property Securities Register; four known preferential creditors; and 36 known unsecured creditors. A total of $594,026 was owing.
The value of company assets to offset this debt are yet to be determined.
"It is not possible to determine whether a dividend will become payable to creditors until all of the [company] records have been examined," Mr Jenkins said in the report.
Some of the secured creditors, with registered interests, include the ANZ bank, Steel and Tube and Marac Finance, who are understood to be owed more than $427,000.
