The re-emergence of the UK car industry as a global leader is helping a Black Country manufacturer target the fastest growth in its nine year-history.
Cab Automotive, which produces a range of interior components including seats, arm rests, parcel trays and dashboard consoles, has secured £7m of new contracts to supply parts for the new BMW Mini and the seat foams for the Renault van.
These latest successes will help the firm push turnover towards the £40m level and increase the workforce by 30%.
It marks an exciting twelve months for the company which has seen it work with the Manufacturing Advisory Service (MAS) to develop new opportunities and, importantly, buy its 200,000 sq ft factory in Tipton.
Richard McCulloch, finance director, said: “We’ve gone from £20m in 2012 to a predicted £40m by the end of this year, with plenty of new opportunities in the pipeline.
“Managing this growth was one thing, but at the same time we were told by our landlord that there was a chance our facility could be sold. The only solution was to buy the land, as that would give us the platform and security to plan for the next decade.”
He added that the company, by working with MAS, developed an application to the Regional Growth Fund that saw it successfully secure £1m towards the £4.5m total cost of the purchase.
As part of the expansion, Cab Automotive has spent more than £4m on capital equipment, a state-of-the-art foam production line, new machines for wrapping BMW Mini arm rests and a new water jet cutter.
The company exclusively operates in the automotive sector and works both as a tier 1 and tier 2 supplier into some of the biggest automotive OEMs in the world, including Jaguar Land Rover, Aston Martin, Nissan, Toyota and McLaren Automotive.
