Box city … an army "killing zone" training complex in Queensland built of shipping containers.
PORTABLE shipping containers are normally used to move goods from one end of the world to the other, but one company has turned them into a money-spinner by making them good enough to live in, cook in, or hide in from a bomb blast.
Royal Wolf Holdings, a shipping container leasing and sales group with operations in Australia and New Zealand, has a fleet of more than 33,450 containers that it converts into everything from accommodation for mining camps to offices, kitchens and mobile refrigerators.
It has sold containers to the Australian army, which has used them to build a "killing zone" training complex in Queensland.
Royal Wolf, which has been in business since 1995, was floated on the stock exchange in May 2011, raising $91.5 million at $1.83 a share. Yesterday its share price closed unchanged at $2. It posted a $5 million profit for the six months to December.
The firm generated $67.3 million in revenue in the same period, 8.6 per cent more than the previous corresponding six months, and its first interim dividend will be 3.5¢ a share.
Royal Wolf's chief executive, Robert Allan, said the company had benefited from a worldwide boom in commodity prices, with strong demand for accommodation and storage services from the construction and resource industries.
The firm expects earnings for the 2012 full year to be about $16 million, after securing rental contracts for five container-based mining camps, with an annualised rental revenue worth $2.7 million.
''Our growth areas have really been around resource and construction, but also the freight industry,'' Mr Allan said.
''We have a large footprint in supplying specialised containers to the removals industry, and we're just coming through our best-ever performance with the freight industry.''
