Award-winning Coventry oil and gas business diversifies to help Covid battle

Published by

Nicky Godding

An award-winning Coventry business which has a multi-million pound order book in the oil and gas industry has diversified to help the battle against Covid-19.

MNB Precision Ltd in Binns Close, Torrington Avenue, which provides manufacturing and precision engineering services, has been working on the Government’s appeal for help to create ventilators.

Ninety-seven of the company’s 111-strong workforce is currently working at its 36,000 sq ft state-of-the-art premises to design and produce supplies for its oil and gas customers in America, Norway and Scotland.

After being contacted by the Coventry and Warwickshire Local Enterprise Partnership (CWLEP) Growth Hub enquiring whether they could help with the Government’s call to help produce ventilators in the Coronavirus pandemic, MNB Precision has been making parts.

Luke Benton, of MNB Precision, who owns the business along with his brother, Elliot, and dad, Mark, said its highly-skilled workforce had produced ventilator parts.

“We were contacted by the Growth Hub to see if we could help with the supply of medical ventilators,” he said.

“The machines we have can be configured to run any CAD design that we feed into the machines so we sourced the raw materials and started work on ventilator parts for a few weeks.

“We have switched back to our usual operations which means our workforce is now working on our £6.5 million order book which was mostly secured before the pandemic.

“The main impact is the drop in oil and gas prices which means our customers still want their orders but a few months later which means a delay in our ability to invoice.

“There is no-one else in the world that provides the range of products that we do and together with our technical ability, it means we remain agile and are still operating at 100 per cent capacity.”

Justine Chadwick, account manager at the CWLEP Growth Hub, said the team at MNB Precision was presented with the nationwide Lloyds Bank Small to Medium Sized Business of the Year and the Insider Made in UK Manufacturer of the Year under £25 million turnover awards last year.

She said: “MNB Precision is a world-leader in their field and has seen significant growth in recent years in their expertise in the oil and gas industry which is emphasised by their current busy workload.

“They are another perfect example of a Coventry and Warwickshire business which has proved its diversification skills during Covid-19 with their response to the ventilator project and after winning two prestigious awards last year, I am sure they will go from strength to strength.”

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.