Member Article

Record deal sees Mec Com head for £12.5m

A Hixon-based fabrication specialist is celebrating its 15th birthday in style after it landed a £2.7m order with electronics giant Siemens.

Mec Com, which is part of the Midlands Assembly Network (MAN), unveiled the contract win during a visit by Jeremy Lefroy MP to its 60,000sq ft facility in Staffordshire last week.

The company has invested over £500,000 creating a dedicated cell for final assembly and test of protection and control relays.

25 new jobs will be created immediately to deliver the five-year project, including two team leaders, a quality engineer and a senior buyer.

“We’ve been actively targeting new business opportunities, where we can add value from the design stage right through to manufacture,” explained Richard Bunce, Managing Director.

“This project was initially heading overseas, but we have been able to prove to our customer that we can offer greater flexibility, reduced lead times and world class quality. Naturally, we also have to be competitive and the UK now is.”

He continued: “The order comes at perfect time for us, as we have just fitted out the new 20,000 sq ft building, adjacent to our existing unit. There’s still some capacity in there so we’ll be going after even more work.”

Mec Com is one of Staffordshire’s fastest growing manufacturers, increasing turnover from £5m when it moved into private ownership in 2000 to a record £12.5m this year.

Its success has been based on a commitment to investing in the latest machinery and in building a global supply network that includes a sister plant in Romania and manufacturing agreements in China.

This approach allows it to competitively offer high, medium and low volume manufacturing services to clients operating in food processing, machine tool, medical, power and distribution and rail.

“We identified pretty early on that manufacturing is now an international business and we’ve worked hard in developing our operations to reflect that,” continued Richard.

“Export levels are now nearly 40% and our biggest market is Germany…something you would never have believed ten years ago.”

He went on to add: “We currently offer fabrication, light assembly, coil winding and general machining and are continually adding to the services we can provide our customers.

“There could be some more big news to come if we secure a major reshoring opportunity we are working on.”

Jeremy Lefroy, MP for Stafford, received a guided tour of Mec Com’s Hixon base, including meeting workers and getting a first look at the company’s ‘Solkor’ test and assembly line…a project it won this time last year from Siemens.

He was impressed with the firm’s commitment to investment, especially the installation of a state-of-the-art Trumpf laser cutting machine and a solvent free powder coating plant.

He commented: “I first visited Mec Com more than five years ago and have to congratulate Richard and his team on the progress they have made. It is especially pleasing that the firm’s largest export market is Germany and that companies are increasingly keeping work in the UK when it could be sent overseas.”

Mec Com joined the Midlands Assembly Network in 2012, a collective of eight sub-contract manufacturers and a specialist design consultancy who work together to win work at home and overseas.

The group, which features Advanced Chemical Etching, Alucast, Barkley Plastics, Brandauer, Grove Design, Muller Holdings, PP Electrical Systems and SMT Developments, employs 700 people over 12 factories and this year will smash the £70m combined turnover barrier.

MAN has also enlisted the support of the Warwick Manufacturing Group to help it develop new processes and technologies.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Russ Cockburn .