Administrators at troubled steel product manufacturer, Caparo Industries have announced 330 jobs have been saved in Oldbury and Bilston.
A total of 76 jobs in the West Midlands and South of England were saved last week when PwC confirmed Caparo Testing Technologies had been sold, bringing the total number of jobs saved at the company to 409.
Robert Moran, partner at PwC, commented: “The sale of Caparo Tubular Solutions is a major boost for the Midlands economy, the employees of Caparo, and more widely for the UK steel industry.
“This deal preserves all 333 jobs at Caparo Tubular Solutions, which manufactures, distributes and supplies advanced tube components and parts for the automotive and aerospace industries in the West Midlands and South Wales.”
Matthew Hammond, Midlands region chairman for PwC and lead administrator, added: “We are delighted to have made further substantial progress with this deal. We had targeted selling a number of the Caparo businesses during November.
“Our deals team, led by Robert Moran with corporate finance support from Neil Sumner, has successfully concluded transactions in November which preserve businesses and employment.”
The new owners say they are confident the steel industry still has a future in the West Midlands and beyond.
Chief executive of Liberty, Sanjeev Gupta said: “There are many natural synergies between our hot rolled coil production business and Caparo’s design, manufacture and distribution of steel tube and various specialist engineering products.
“They are established customers for our product and we have, in fact, looked at them in the past about the possibility of integrating the two businesses in order to help create a comprehensive and robust new model for the steel sector in the UK. We now aim to achieve that objective.”
“I believe that, despite the current difficulties being encountered by the UK steel industry, there is a future for the sector in Britain, if we can develop more efficient business models based on streamlined integrated production, processing and distribution.
“This, together with the new initiatives now supported by the Government to lower energy costs for energy intensive industries, provides an opportunity for UK steel once again to be competitive.
“Caparo Tubular Solutions was a fundamentally profitable business with substantial, sustainable value, and we were very attracted to its highly-skilled management and workforce, extensive distribution network and top-quality customer base.”
