Gloucester global engineering firm considers bringing manufacturing back to HQ

Published by

Nicky Godding

Global engineering technologies company, Renishaw, is considering bringing its additive manufacturing (AM) business back to its New Mills headquarters site at Wootton under Edge in Gloucestershire from Staffordshire.

The manufacturing of AM systems will continue at the company's Miskin site near Cardiff, South Wales.

If Renishaw decides to go ahead, it will close its site at Stone in Staffordshire, offering as many of the 120 affected employees as possible jobs in Gloucestershire, supporting them with relocation packages.

Renishaw has begun its collective consultation process with these employees at the Stone site.

“We have invested heavily in all aspects of AM system design and are very pleased with the market adoption of the RenAM 500Q multi-laser machine”, said William Lee, Renishaw's Chief Executive. “We have exciting plans for future systems that will further boost the adoption of AM for series production, but in a competitive global business we need to be agile and efficient in how we bring these new technologies to market.”

He continued, “Our current thinking is that the most effective way to achieve this would be for our AM technical and commercial teams to be co-located in our Gloucestershire facilities. The AM team at the Stone site has made a major contribution to our progress and we sincerely hope that a large number of them would relocate to our headquarters site if the closure goes ahead.”

Renishaw’s Gloucestershire headquarters site would house an expanded demonstration facility, enabling customers to experience Renishaw's broad range of industrial metrology and additive manufacturing technologies, covering process development, 3D printing, finish machining and part verification.

Nicky Godding

Nicky Godding is editor of The Business Magazine. Before her journalism career, she worked mainly in public relations moving into writing when she was invited to launch Retail Watch, a publication covering retail and real estate across Europe. After some years of constant travelling, she tucked away her passport and concentrated on business writing, co-founding a successful regional business magazine. She has interviewed some of the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs who have built multi-million-pound businesses and reported on many science and technology firsts. She reports on the region’s thriving business economy from start-ups, family businesses and multi-million-pound corporations, to the professionals that support their growth and the institutions that educate the next generation of business leaders.