Multispares is an independent company providing mainstream distribution for aftermarket truck and bus parts. Our products are sourced from leading manufacturers and specialist suppliers in all regions of the world.

Quality comes first at Multispares. We are a public company with a proper sense of ethical and social responsibility. We stand behind the quality of our products, especially their reliability and durability in service.

Keeping prices low is important to our customers. So we work hard to eliminate unnecessary costs and we buy in the right quantities to reduce our prices. At home we run a fully integrated distribution network that allows us to efficiently import, distribute and hold stock close to customers. The result is lower prices on high quality products. If you find any Multispares product that isn’t competitively priced then tell us and we’ll fix it!

Professional service that reduces downtime and makes us easy to deal with helps our customers reduce their operating costs. That’s why we have a national Hotline with parts outlets placed around the country. Product development staff are constantly extending our in-house catalogue to speed up our ability to interpret customer requirements. MultiPIT brings this catalogue directly to your PC allowing you to interpret parts and buy online 24/7, without picking up the phone.

After 50 years serving truck and bus customers, the Multispares Mission is clear and unchanged. Today and tomorrow, we aim to provide:

“Quality Parts with Professional Service at Competitive Prices”.

The Founding of Multispares – An Extraordinary Journey

Our journey begins with the unfortunate and at times chaotic demise of the once great Leyland Motors Ltd.

Leyland Motors first entered the Australian market in 1919 as a branch of the UK operation. For most of the period from 1919, Leyland was an aggressive, successful and highly profitable manufacturer of trucks and buses. Leyland was also highly regarded for their internal programs that trained, developed and promoted talented young men through their ranks to senior corporate positions.

In 1962, Leyland Motors acquired Associated Commercial Vehicles, the parent company of AEC. At that time, Hastings Deering held the agency for AEC buses in Australia and, following the acquisition, local AEC operations were merged into Leyland. Our founder, Harry Forsyth had been working at AEC but, with his sharp mind and technical background, must have thrived in the Leyland ecosystem and soon after this consolidation he emerged as General Manager of Leyland Truck and Bus, responsible for chassis assembly, sales, service and parts.

In 1961, the highly profitable Leyland Motors also acquired the ailing Standard-Triumph car company and in 1967, the Rover Company. This fateful decision to enter the car market was the butterfly effect that years later changed everything for Harry.

In 1968, British Motor Holdings, formerly BMC and then controlling the Austin, Morris and Jaguar brands, was bleeding cash due to poor management and distressed finances. Fearing collapse of the whole British automotive supply chain and along with-it hundreds of thousands of jobs, the British government stepped in to engineer the merger of Leyland Motors and BMH, which then became British Leyland Motor Corporation.

Instead of fixing BMH, this merger dragged Leyland into BMH’s problems and amplified the chaos. In the United Kingdom, the corporate culture became an internal war zone. Militant union strikes, a bloated structure managing competing brands, and outdated manufacturing facilities struggling to manage quality control rendered the very successful Leyland business increasingly dysfunctional and cash strapped.

Back in Australia, the iconic P76 car development project had been conceived by BMC Australia as a locally focused design. In the immediate aftermath of the merger of BMH and Leyland, BMC Australia successfully pitched the production of this new Australian car but were given a budget only two thirds of what they requested and even that had been significantly less than what was needed. As this project progressed towards launch in 1973, much needed additional cash was withheld and in 1974, a British executive was sent to Australia to close the Sydney manufacturing site. All production ended in 1975.

It was a different story at Harry’s Truck and Bus division. Distractions from the car industry merger had slowed investment in new truck model development and Leyland’s local market share for trucks had fallen below 10% as American makes flooded the heavy-duty end and European and Japanese makes the lighter end. However, their Leopard, Tiger, and double-decker Atlantean buses had captured around two thirds of the Australian metropolitan bus market and an even higher share in New Zealand.

During the 1960s and 70s, family companies dominated private Australian metropolitan bus operations, particularly in the fast-growing outer suburbs of the major cities. These family companies had formed powerful independent associations to lobby for the interests of private operators who were often in fierce conflict with heavily subsidised government fleets. The associations and their members had deeply held convictions around the values of family business, values that sat very comfortably with Harry. This, along with his commercial rigour and great interpersonal skills helped him build a strong network of relationships with these private bus operators.

Today, we can only imagine the extreme frustration Harry felt as Leyland collapsed around his successful and profitable division. Early in 1976, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall for Leyland, Harry made the precipitous decision to resign. His decision to enter the aftermarket for Leyland parts soon after resigning was more a matter of survival than some grand vision. Yet so began the unusual story of Leyspares, started by the trained corporate executive who by chance landed at the frontier of an emerging truck and bus aftermarket parts industry.

At the far end of the world, Leyland had dominated the UK bus market for decades, providing the critical mass for Leyland component manufacturers to sell directly to independent parts companies. Harry had contacts in the UK and started to import replacement parts he knew local fleets would need. Around the same time, the Leyland Truck and Bus division that Harry had previously managed started auctioning off what it considered to be surplus parts. We can only speculate as to what was driving these auctions; changes in local management, loss of critical knowledge, confused purchasing and, no doubt, demands for cash from Leyland’s head office in the UK.

Harry snapped up many consignments at these auctions, often immediately on-selling those items he didn’t want to a local wrecking company. What he kept, he knew he could sell profitably to private bus fleets who had been anxiously watching the slow implosion of Leyland. This was Harry’s baptism into the aftermarket and over the next few years Leyspares emerged at the epicentre of wheeling and dealing in Australia’s nascent truck and bus aftermarket.

In the decade to 1986, Harry built and acquired his way to a highly profitable but complex company structure. Over this period, the market share of Leyland bus was in rapid decline as a new breed of European and Japanese competitors redefined the bus market, just as the truck market had been redefined earlier. Harry saw a very different future, demanding a sophisticated business capable of competing in a more complex aftermarket. He decided to float his company to raise cash needed for investment and force a move away from the wheeling, dealing days of old into a professional, fully integrated national parts operation that would later extend to New Zealand.

With the help of his son, Greg, and the support of other investors in his complex company structure, Harry formed a holding company called Merlind Limited and floated this on the Illawarra arm of the Second Board of the Australian Stock Exchange, just 40 days before Black Tuesday hit the markets on 20th October 1987. The 25% fall in the All Ords on that day remains easily the largest single-day collapse in our stock market’s history.

The Second Board quickly gained a reputation as a haven for “blue-sky” shell companies, taxation loopholes, and corporate misconduct. State Corporate Affairs Commissions began aggressively pushing for its removal and in 1992 the ASX officially terminated the Second Board program. A handful of the higher quality, surviving companies were permitted to transfer up to the ASX Main Board. One of these was Harry’s company. By then, Leyspares had become Multispares.