Cooperating to build a better world

The importance of cooperatives to our economy and to our society cannot be overstated. Across the planet, cooperatives are working to build a better world.

Recognising this, the United Nations has made 2025 the International Year of Cooperatives, with celebrations peaking around the International Day of Cooperatives on Saturday, 5 July 2025.

They’re celebrations we will be joining. After all, Capricorn was formed as a cooperative by a group of 17 Golden Fleece service station owners in Western Australia 51 years ago. Today we’re a Community of more than 30,000 Members and over 2,000 Preferred Suppliers across Australia and New Zealand that come together in order to run stronger, more efficient and more profitable businesses.

The success of our organisation was never guaranteed. But what we’ve managed to achieve together is a testament not just to the vision of the original 12 and the hard work of all those who have followed, but to the value Members have continued to see in the power of the cooperative.

A key reason Capricorn has survived and flourished is because we've spent half a century listening to and meeting the needs of our Community. This, in turn, has helped everyone thrive together.

Take Stephen Rowe from Jarrow Auto Service in South Australia. He’s been a Member since 1989 and says

Capricorn takes the stress out of running his business.

“You do your normal job every day, you just do what you do, you buy your parts from wherever you get them from—from the Capricorn Preferred Suppliers—and you don’t have to think about what you’re doing,” he said. “And, in the background, Capricorn just grows.”

Warren Anderson, of Warren Anderson Motors in New Zealand, has been a Member since 2004. He said Capricorn allows him to provide a better, faster and more efficient service to his customers.

“Capricorn is so well-known that you can ring up (a Preferred Supplier), quote a Capricorn number, the supplier doesn’t need to worry about money, he just goes ‘yep’, and that’s it. He’s got your number and sends you the part. You can have the part the next day.”

Our cooperative structure means our Members are our shareholders. We also have six Member Directors on our Board. That plays an important role in guiding our decision making and ensures that everything we do is in the best interests of Members. Profits are either invested back into services for Members or put directly back into the pockets of Members through dividends, rebates and Rewards Points. That’s the cooperative advantage.

We engage with a broad range of stakeholders to manage risks and opportunities across our operations, to ensure we’re always delivering for Members and Preferred Suppliers. Recently, we released our first Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) report, which identified several areas of focus where we can create positive (and mitigate negative) impacts for our stakeholders.

These areas of focus include empowering Members, climate resilience, sustainable consumption, employee wellbeing, innovation and digital transformation, data governance and cybersecurity, ethical supply chains, and integrity and accountability. Our ESG report puts in place a framework to ensure transparency and accountability— making sure that we retain the trust of our Members, Preferred Suppliers and other stakeholders long into the future. It’s about being a good corporate citizen—doing the right thing by our people, our stakeholders, our community and our planet.

Doing the right thing is at the very heart of our cooperative ethos. We believe we are stronger when we work together, and that means playing our part—like tackling the skills shortage that has been impacting the industry for at least a decade.

Capricorn has developed a strategy to tackle the skills shortage. We’ll be rolling out analysis and initiatives in the coming months and years, but the hard work is already underway. We’ve started hosting career expos with our partners at the Motor Trades Associations in some states, which we will continue to build and grow. Our Rising Stars program has been expanded to recognise more outstanding apprentices than ever before.

We’re able to do all this precisely because we’re a cooperative, and the best interests of our whole Community - Members, Preferred Suppliers and team membersare one and the same. That’s the cooperative difference. That’s why they matter. And that’s why we’ll be celebrating this 5 July.