ENGINEERING AND MANUFACTURING
MartijnVos
Lightweight car parts firm gears up for heavyweight investment
The industry-leading multi-national is poised to make a multi-million pound investment in Gloucester and create 40 new jobs in the motor industry. Just off Spinnaker Road, the Nordic giant Hydro is readying itself to plug into the expected new wave of electric car manufacturing gearing up to begin in the UK. As the drive towards electric vehicles accelerates, the move away from fossil fuels is already well underway and has seen Honda call time on Swindon and engine maker Ford pack its bags in Bridgend, both costing thousands of jobs. As Martijn Vos, managing director of Hydro Components UK, will tell you, it is far from the end of the motor car industry in the UK, but as a supplier ‘we must adjust to the changes in the market place’. Mr Vos is already hard at work on that here in the UK – in Gloucester to be a precise – on plans to expand an existing car parts manufacturing plant, so it is capable of housing all the manufacturing processes under one roof for aluminium roof rail and trim components. Investment will be heavyweight - £3 million, with 40 jobs expected to be created. “We are currently putting two factories into one. We
are closing the Rotherham site and relocating the fabrication and assembly to Gloucester. “Rotherham is a powder painting facility and we will relocate that line and those skills to Gloucester, which means we will need to employ people with painting experience. “The Gloucester site is currently not big enough to accommodate all the new equipment and processes. That is why we brought the land adjacent to this plant,” said Mr Vos, trying his best to stop thinking about the planning detail he is not yet 100 per cent
70 | February 2020 | www. punchline-gloucester .com
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