By Ian Mean
Business West Gloucestershire director and vice-chair GFirstLEP
Gloucestershire’s largest privately owned company celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.
Renishaw is a veritable powerhouse of innovation. It is also a big contributor to the Gloucestershire economy and to our county’s reputation for world class engineering.
Listed on the London Stock Exchange’s FTSE 250 Index, Renishaw has a current valuation of around £3 billion.
And the company employs 5 200 people in 36 countries including 3,400 staff at its sites in the UK- primarily here in Gloucestershire and South Wales.
It is an economic powerhouse as well as well as an innovative engineering giant with record sales of £671.1 million for the year ended June 2022.
And an amazing 95% of those sales are due to exports with the company’s largest markets being China, USA, Japan and Germany.
Innovation has always been at the heart of the company and it was formed to commercialise what turned out to be a great idea.
That was the invention of a touch-trigger probe by the now executive chairman, Sir David McMurtry, that solved a dimensional measurement problem faced by Rolls-Royce when manufacturing the Olympus engines that powered the supersonic Concorde aircraft.
To mark the company’s 50th milestone, Renishaw are holding a year of global activities with open house events at its sites, family days for employees and a “50 at 50” charity initiative which will see £150 000 donated to 50 not for profit organisations in the 36 countries where it has offices.
From the manufacture of aircraft, cars, smartphones, electric vehicles batteries and solar panels to brain surgery and dentistry, there is barely an industry that does not in some way benefit from Renishaw’s ongoing innovations.
I like Renishaw’s guiding purpose: Transforming Tomorrow Together.
It means working with customers to make the products, create the materials and develop the therapies that are going to be need for the future.
Renishaw is a company that all Gloucestershire should celebrate in its 50th year.
We are proud of them.
