Recently I was at an event. The type of event doesn’t really matter but it was one of those business gatherings. During a lull in the day I was having a cup of tea and chatting to someone when the inevitable ‘what is it you do’ question came up.

I explained that we were tube and pipe manipulators and fabricators and that we also produced hydraulic and pneumatic hose assemblies amongst other things. There was a pause and then the person I was chatting to said something that I have heard many, many times. He said

“So you work in quite a small specialist market then?”

This is a common misconception about what we do. I can see that from outside of the industry we could seem to be working a very small market but in actual fact you would be amazed at the range of customers we have.

As consumers we tend to see the whole of the final product and don’t give much regard to the individual components within it. So for example while you’re driving in to work tomorrow and you see a construction under way the chances are that the construction vehicles contain some of our hydraulic or pneumatic hose assemblies. The pipe and tubes we create will possibly be used in the final construction of the building itself. So the construction and building industries are part of our portfolio.

Further along you may see large agricultural machinery working in the fields. Again here we may well have provided components for both the machinery and later the manufacturing process that gets the food to the supermarket for you.

As far as the transport of the food to the supermarkets goes; well we could be there again somewhere in the build of the vehicles. In point of fact the automotive industry is one of our biggest consumers across our range. This includes the railway infrastructure where we may have provided products for the initial build and to replace those where the wear and tear of high-speed transportation has taken its toll. Shipping, mining and many other markets also use our designs and fabrications.

This brings us to the after market sales area. Many of our products are specifically designed and packaged for retail. This means complete kits and appropriate packaging for the client.

Of course before they reach the market a large percentage of our fabrications need to be designed to very specific client specifications. There is rarely a one size fits all solution so we need to design from scratch. This often involves working very closely with the client to ensure critical systems have exactly the right specifications for the build.

So, yes, we are very specialised in that we are experts in our field, but the markets we work with are far from limited and as we expand into Europe, that market is still growing.