The economic value of the global animal health industry might be largely unknown to many, overshadowed by more popular markets like mining and agriculture, however two established Victorian manufactures have set their sights on capitalising on their long-standing partnership to grab a slice of the growing market.
Melbourne head-quartered manufacturer ANCA, a vertically integrated operator that specialises in precision tooling, works with Bendigo-based The Edge Equine to produce equine dental products, primarily rasps for manual horse dentistry.
The partnership, which is almost 20 years old, was created after a local horse dentist made an inquiry to sharpen his equine dental blades in the early 2000s.
Since then, the market has continued to grow propelled by strong demand locally – Victoria is home to the premium Spring Racing Carnival that offered more than US$59.2 million in prizemoney in 2022 and injects billions into the local Victorian economy.
Today, The Edge Equine with the help of ANCA, has significantly scaled up its business beyond servicing the local market, shipping its equine dental products to more than 40 countries, with distributors in the US and UK, New Zealand, and South Africa.
The Edge Equine’s Managing Director Tim McMahon believes ANCA’s vertical integration plays a key role in helping build his own company’s capabilities and capacity.
“ANCA continues to be fantastic to work with,” McMahon explains.
“They helped us write our programs, get the machines up and going and then when we swapped to our first FX3, ANCA developed the programmes to make our products which was absolutely fantastic,” McMahon explains.
With the animal health market size forecast to be worth US$67.56 billion by 2026, ANCA and The Edge Equine’s relationship highlights the value of Australian sovereign capability to remain competitive at a global scale.
“Our businesses are located just two hours away from each other, which means that we are able to work closely with The Edge Equine to ensure the machines we supply meet their growing needs,” says ANCA Machine Tools General Manager Ed Boland.
“We are proud our Australian designed, engineered and built machines are playing a key role in helping Australian manufactured products compete on a global scale.”
ANCA most recently supplied The Edge Equine with a new machine to meet growing demand, while expanding the latter’s manufacturing capabilities.
The ANCA FX5E provides The Edge Equine with scope for more high precision grinding in the industrial regrinding market and the ability to potentially produce new products for the veterinary space.
“The FX5E has the capacity to have robotics fitted and it will be something to look at in the future as our market grows and with the help of ANCA, we’ll develop a process to automate the process of blades,” McMahon adds.
“At the moment we manually feed the machines, which still works well for us, but we have the opportunity to grow further on the automation stage.”
McMahon is confident that the company will see continual growth in the animal health industry, enabling The Edge Equine to be a leader in the manufacture of manual tools for equine dentistry. He envisions using the FX5E along with ANCA’s technology to manufacture other products within the veterinary space in the next 10 to 15 years.
