Partner Article

American’s swoop for Teesside firm

AN ENGINEERING firm has announced plans to double its workforce to 60 and step up its presence in Europe and the Middle East after being snapped up by an American company.

New opportunities in the industrial training and nuclear sectors, and the chance to bid for bigger global contracts, beckon for Stockton’s TAS Engineering Consultants after being bought by GSE Systems, based in Baltimore, Maryland.

The firm said the deal will enable it to now bid for contracts worth in excess of £1m – something it couldn’t previously do due to limited cash flow.

With the weight of a US giant with an additional operation in Glasgow behind it, TAS is now aiming to tap into the growing global demand for services related to the development of nuclear power stations.

As well as the UK, it will target the Middle East where some leaders are looking for energy alternatives rather than eating into their valuable oil and gas assets.

The company is also currently in the running for a £600,000 consultancy contract in Europe. Its previous work on the Continent includes involvement in the development of the Disneyland Paris resort, while it has also worked on contracts in Spain.

Managing director John Maplesden said: “In our previous operations we have been an order managed company and cash has always been tight.

“We have always had to avoid the contracts that might take us out of business. But now with GSE, they are cash rich, and they have offered financial support to projects so we can be a lot more confident in jobs that we are bidding for.”

He also said the takeover would result in no redundancies, although there will be a management re-shuffle as GSE members join the team, while the TAS brand name will live on in the short-term at least.

The last two years have seen TAS double its turnover to £2.4m - growth which has been driven in part by its ability to develop control room simulators for the energy industry.

The company, which has additional offices in Stevenage, Gloucester amd Hereford, originally started life in the 1970s serving Teesside’s process industry but has since diversified into the pharmaceutical, oil and gas, healthcare, defence and food sectors.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .