Guhring UK celebrated its 50th anniversary in style with a celebratory event at its Birmingham headquarters. Hosted at the state-of-the-art manufacturing site in Estone Drive, Guhring welcomed technical partners, customers, suppliers as well as esteemed guests such as Chairman of the Board Oliver Guehring.
Guhring UK was founded 50 years ago in a rented facility a few miles from its existing site as an operation that was only selling drills to local manufacturers with a trade counter for ‘walk-in’ ordering. Wind forward to today and the company operates from a 60,000sq/ft manufacturing facility that produces solid carbide and HSS round tooling as well as PCD tools with a complete service for bespoke specialised tooling production, regrinding and service, coating, tool design and much more.
Opening proceedings, Guhring UK Managing Director Chris Weston presented the company’s first product catalogue from 50 years ago and discussed the journey from a small local supplier to one of the UK’s most successful cutting tool manufacturers. Chris said: “Today, the range has grown exponentially. We can now offer almost every rotary cutting tool from drills, reamers, taps and milling cutters in HSS, carbide, PCD and Cermet along with grooving tools, tool holders and vending and tool management systems. Most of these tools are manufactured here in the UK and we also hold up to £5m of inventory of standard product lines for next-day delivery.”
Looking to the future, Chris continued: “Moving to this fantastic facility in 2017 was a huge leap forward and it will be the springboard to help us grow over the next 50 years. We have 35,000sq/ft of land to expand our manufacturing capabilities – futureproofing our business for the long term future.”
Looking at the business from a global perspective, the Chairman of the Board and the fourth generation of the family-owned business, Mr Oliver Guehring was hugely proud of the UK facility. Mr Guehring discussed how the 47 worldwide subsidiaries achieved record growth in 2022, something that is forecast to continue through 2023 and beyond, despite worldwide geo-political factors such as the Ukraine war, restrictions on business with Russia, US and China tensions and of course, Covid.
Gareth Jones, Managing Director of In-Comm training also gave a presentation on the future of manufacturing and why companies like Guhring that invest hugely in apprenticeships and staff training are the future of UK manufacturing. Following the presentations, guests were given tours of the facility and invited to test their skills with some fun activities such as golf, and a driving simulator and there was an arena set up by renowned Guhring customer RoboChallenge for attendees to pit their wits against fellow attendees in the robot arena. The Friday event was followed by a Saturday ‘family day’ for employees to invite their relatives to the facility to tour the factory and participate in the fun-filled celebrations. In September, Guhring will be celebrating 125 years of business with festive activities set to be hosted in Germany.
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