KREAB Gavin Anderson and SAS Group are two of the latest additions to the government and public relations sector servicing the burgeoning Western Australian market.
Remaining atop the WA Business News ‘Book of Lists’ (see page 16) were PPR and Clarity Communications.
Both outfits increased employee numbers during the past year.
Four-year-old firm, GRA Everingham Advisory, turns over more than $2 million each year concentrating solely on government relations.
GRA Everingham Advisory managing director and 2010 40under40 Award winner, Paul Everingham, said GRA, the government relations arm of national advertising company Clemenger Group, approached him to buy 49 per cent of his namesake advisory business in 2008 (two years after creating the firm) in order to establish a foothold in Western Australia.
And it’s likely that GRA wasn’t the only national or international group shopping around in WA at that stage.
“I have noticed that FD Third Person and also Gavin Anderson, and three or four national/international groups, have set up offices in Perth, and a lot of that is to do with WA’s reach into Asia,” Mr Everingham said.
Casey Cahill, director of internationally backed newcomer Kreab Gavin Anderson, said his company, which established itself in Perth in October last year, was an advisory firm and not a lobby group that traditionally “peddled something for the sake of peddling”.
“Obviously WA is an important market in terms of the Australian economy and the company rightly identified it needed a presence here,” he said.
Jonathan Shack launched SAS Group in WA last November as other players left the state or entered a period of consolidation.
Queensland-based Rowland pulled out of WA in late 2008 after three years trying to capitalise on the resources market, while Halden Burns director Anne Burns said the company was not replacing the two full-time staff it lost during the last year.
“Instead we’re consolidating and working harder ourselves,” she said.
“With WA on the cusp of another boom, it was inevitable with so much activity on the horizon that other entrants would enter the market.”
