In profile: Meet Mitsubishi Australia's CEO, Shaun Westcott

As a migrant to Australia, everyone has a unique back-story that led to them arriving on our shores – and Shaun Westcott is no different.

Though his reasons for seeking a better life Down Under have less to do with visions of beautiful golden beaches and more to do with seeking safety for his family.

High levels of crime in his home country of South Africa, and one particularly horrific shooting incident in a shopping centre, led Westcott to Adelaide – where he now heads up Mitsubishi Australia as CEO.

“I'm not sure how many Australians know too much about South Africa, but it has a serious crime problem. And we had some fairly traumatic experiences,” he tells Wheels.

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“One day I was in a store, not unlike a Big W, with my family and these guys came in with automatic rifles and opened fire. So I phoned the police and these guys saw I was doing that and they started shooting at me. So I slid my phone across the floor and rolled under a shelf in the centre of the aisle to try and stop the bullets from hitting me. Then my daughters and I ran into the clothing section and we were just ripping clothes off the racks to protect ourselves because bullets were flying everywhere.

“So we’ve had some very traumatic experiences, which unfortunately a lot of South Africans have suffered, that made us realise that we need to go to a safer country. The reality is, I actually earn a lot less money in Australia than I did in South Africa. But I came here for the quality of life.”

Prior to his move in 2017, Westcott worked in a variety of fields, including the forestry and mining industries, at Coca-Cola, and in HR during the Apartheid revolution.

"I came here for the quality of life"

“I was in industrial relations at that time and in the mining industry, if people broke a strike and they went to work they were murdered, they had the heads chopped off. So it was a very violent time in our history, and I was at the forefront of that,” he tells us.

“But I did particularly well, got recognised, got put on a fast track management development program, and got the opportunity to get into management at a very young age, moving up the ranks fairly rapidly. I studied marketing along the way and then went into general management.”

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After first taking a role leading an automation and robotics company when arriving in Adelaide, the self-described adventurer was drawn to the Japanese carmaker – the last carmaker based in South Australia – through his love of four-wheel driving and travel.

“It’s what I've grown up doing my whole life is having fun, camping, outdoors, four-wheel driving activities, extreme adventure. Everything from skydiving to scuba-diving, to rally driving to whatever you can think of. I've probably done it,” he says.

"I think I have the record in Mitsubishi for the fastest promotion to CEO"

Initially Westcott joined as Mitsubishi’s Director of Aftersales in 2019, and got to work quickly – taking the department’s global rankings from eighth to first in the world within six months.

“The philosophy when I joined Mitsubishi was that accessories were something that you sell after you've sold the car. What I did is turn that on its head and said you can use accessories to define the car. And we actually used accessories to define the GSR. I think I have the record in Mitsubishi for the fastest promotion to CEO as I was in the role eight and a half months before I took over.”

By now those who are good at maths or a dab hand with a calculator will have realised this puts Westcott’s promotion squarely in March/April of 2020, and we all know too well what happened next…

“I had already been interviewed and I was to take responsibility on April 1 and of course on March 20 then Prime Minister Scott Morrison shut the country down,” he remembers.

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“Luckily, taking over right as COVID-19 struck, I had two things to fall back on. One is my spirit of adventure and I love a challenge no matter what it is. I'm a bit of an adrenaline junkie. And then second was that because I'd worked in different countries, even with Coca-Cola, I had come out of an environment where economies were not as stable as when I arrived in Australia.

“I mean, to me, it was remarkable. I think we'd had about 18 years of straight economic growth, no recession. Where I come from we have recessions and depressions and all kinds of things on an ongoing basis, so in a way, my background had equipped me with, I guess, the skills, knowledge, and experience that a lot of Australian CEOs probably didn't have.

“My philosophy is that when life gives you lemons, turn them into lemonade. Sure, we had to do some consolidation, and we went through a belt-tightening exercise, but we have actually grown very significantly throughout the COVID-19 time period. Australia was never an important market for Mitsubishi – yet over the last three years we have become the most important market in the world.”

"...in a way, my background had equipped me with, I guess, the skills, knowledge, and experience that a lot of Australian CEOs probably didn't have"

According to the top boss, whose passion is clear from the more animated he gets as he talks about the things his firm has achieved in the COVID years, Mitsubishi Australia is now the most successful Mitsubishi distributor in the entire world across multitudes of metrics and has one of the biggest market shares – growing from fifth position in the local sales charts at the time he took over to consistently third in 2022.

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“We have grown the brand, we have repositioned the brand in Australia,” he says. “We have moved away from being a so-called value for money brand – which is just shorthand for cheap. I think that's an insult to our Japanese heritage, to our craftmanship, to the durability of our vehicles.

“I mean, there are so many old Mitsubishis running around here. You can drive around the streets of Adelaide, you'll see Magnas that were made probably when I was a kid still going. We made durable good quality cars. We shouldn't be ashamed of that. We are not. We've demonstrated with the new Outlander that we are gaining more premium, but we are not doing that at the loss of our core market. We understand who our core market is – and that’s middle income Australia. What we are doing is extending our range upwards.”

Nameplates like the Pajero, Lancer and the Australian-built Magna established a reputation for solid dependability for Mitsubishi, but nowadays the lineup is in need of a refresh with its ASX, Pajero Sport and Triton having all been on sale for several years – with only the revitalised Outlander SUV and Eclipse Cross (both of which offer plug-in hybrid variants) demonstrating the steps Mitsubishi has taken to revitalise what has long been perceived as an aged portfolio.

In recent months the carmaker has revealed plans to launch 35 electric vehicles by 2030 across five new platforms, but going fully-electric – or even bringing such cars to market anytime soon – is not something it is committed to for one very clear reason climate change enthusiast Westcott is known for being outspoken about.

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“Yes, 35 EV platforms by 30 that is still the plan. But what we've had to do is take a step back and look at the, I'm gonna call it the harsh reality, of where we are at in Australia. We are not Norway, we're not Germany – we are Australia,” he says.

“We have a very large land mass with a very small taxpayer base, and that taxpayer base is expected not only to maintain our roads, but to build a significant new infrastructure – which is only one dimension that a lot of people focus on. What they forget is that you've gotta look at this holistically. It doesn't help us right now to build an EV charging infrastructure across somewhere like the Nullarbor, this is massive country of a lot of nothing. The electricity poles out there aren't even electricity poles.

“And we’re talking about a charger here and there every couple of hundred kilometres, which costs a few hundred thousand dollars, but where is the energy going to come from to power those things? So what we should be talking about first is an energy infrastructure. Then we need to take a step even further back and go, okay, so where's our power coming from? And when I say we are not Europe, our energy currently is 75 per cent coal-powered.

"We are not Norway, we're not Germany – we are Australia"

“We could put up massive arrays of solar panels. We can do lots of things to create renewable energy – but we haven't done them yet. We need to do that so we don't shift the emissions from the tailpipe to the Hunter Valley or wherever the power is being generated.

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“Lots of people talk about Mitsubishi and the fact that we only have PHEVs and not full EVs, there’s always this insinuation that somehow we don’t know how to do an EV. Well, we bought the world's first mass-produced electric vehicle – the i-MiEV – in 2008. We've been doing it since long before anybody else did it. If you lived in Japan today, your post would be delivered by a Mitsubishi electric vehicle.

“The reason that we have PHEVs in Australia is not because we don't know how to do EVs, so let me blow that method up. The reason we don't do EVs in this country is that we don't think Australia has the necessary infrastructure for a mass rollout yet. As an interim solution, until we get all these other things fixed, is to bring PHEVs to Australia. And we are doing that because we believe it's the right thing to do.”