Dear Sporting Shooters,

It has been quite some time since we offered any sort of update, contributed to by the mere fact that 2020 was a year like no other; bushfires, a pandemic, stock market crashes and rallies, and ultimately lockdowns for large swathes of the Australian population at various periods of time.

We at Australian Munitions have faced these challenges head on, while additionally having to deal with keeping COVID out of the facilities and managing cross border staff movements due to border closures between New South Wales and Victoria.

We would like to assure you, the factory continues to run at maximum capacity, 24 hours a day, and we’re supplying as much propellant to the market as possible. In fact, any difficulty in accessing our propellants is due to unprecedented demand and NOT a reduction in manufacturing or supply to the Australia market.

That said, we are abundantly aware that our beloved ADI World Class Powders have, at different times of the year, been nigh impossible to obtain across the country.

We plan to release some additional articles in the coming weeks, that address domestic propellant demand, the outlook for each region of Australia as well as the individual rifle propellants, but for now we need to address the elephant in the room – the APS range of propellants.

APS Propellants

As many would be only too aware, we’ve continued to face challenges with regards to our commercial pistol and shotgun propellants. Having spent 1,000’s of man hours over the past 4+ years trying to deliver these commercial pistol and shotgun propellants for reloaders, which have been designed specifically for Australian shooters (we don’t export these at all), we are still not in a position where the propellants being produced are of the high standard we should expect of an ADI World Class product, or that you as a user of our propellants would demand.

We are now in a position where any continued effort to progress manufacturing or development of commercial pistol and shotgun propellants would, at this time, comes at the expense of delivering our commercial rifle propellants.  Because of this, we’ve had to make the incredibly difficult decision to pause active development projects and cease production of commercial reloading products under the Australian Pistol & Shotgun (APS) range for the foreseeable future.

We understand that this will be an unpopular decision, and we’re very much aware of the ramifications of this decision to dealers/retailers, shooters etc., but unfortunately the reality is that we simply cannot make these products at the performance-level demanded by the sporting shooter end user at the current time.

Frequently Asked Question

I’ve heard AP70N is made in Canada and supplied to the US market, why don’t you just buy AP70N from there and bring it back to Australia?

We’ve looked at this a number of times over the past few years, but unfortunately there is no solution here either. Ignoring the fact that if we placed an order today it would be 2023 before it shipped from Canada, there is still no cost-effective way to get the propellant to Australia, packed and shipped out to local retailers.

In other words, the landed cost of the propellant would be so high that you’d opt for factory ammunition instead to actually save yourself money over reloading. There is no big surprise here, as Australian distributors have already experienced this exact situation with other brands, such as Vihtavuori and more recently Winchester and Hodgdon.

In our next article, we will talk about domestic propellant demand and the current challenges we’re facing.