Lai Industries grows rapidly in Adelaide to be a national leader in making switchboards and related products
Lai Industries Adelaide plant at Days Road, Ferryden Park. An Australian leader in designing and making switchboards and associated products, it also expanded interstate.
Lai Industries, one of the nation’s largest manufacturers of switchboards in the early 21st Century, started in 1969 in a small warehouse in the Adelaide inner west suburb of Brompton.
Later company director Gio Iarriccio formed a partnership of owners who took over the business as Lai Industries in 1996 with a staff of 18 at Athol Park.
The company’s rapid growth outgrew the Athol Park premises and, as a family-owned business, it moved in 2005 to a modern factory at Hendon in Adelaide’s west. In 2014, Lai Industries bought and merged with PSG Manufacturing while increasing its workforce to more than 200 employees, with offices and state-of-the-art manufacturing plants in South Australia, Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales. The move to another bigger Adelaide factory at Days Road, Ferryden Park, came in 2018.
Lai Switchboards Australia, within the Lai Industries group, became a leader in the design and manufacture of custom switchboards, created innovative and cost effective solutions for industry, building, commercial and the government sectors. It was a specialist designer and manufacturer in defence work, major coal and mining operations, airport and infrastructure projects.
Lai Industries also made products associated with switchboards including motor control centres, PLC (programmable logic controller) panels, industrial MV/LV kiosk substations, packaged switch room solutions, cubic modular systems, transformers, primary and secondatu switchgear, meter boards and power distribution boards.
Lai Industries also drew on in-house design and manufacturing to create electrical switchboards for power distrtbution, generation synchronising, energy management and power factor correction. As an innovator, it also took a lead in ecologically sustainable development, engineering cleaner projects.