Engineering firm celebrates new orders with £100k UK Steel Enterprise investment

A local precision engineering company is planning to add more than £1m to its order book with a £100k investment from UK Steel Enterprise.

This aims to enable it to install new machinery. The new machines, now up-and-running at Ronco Engineering, in Stanley, have given the company a fully automated process that has improved efficiency and brought immediate results.

The loan from UK Steel Enterprise, the business-support subsidiary of Tata Steel, has helped to create six more jobs to swell the current highly skilled workforce to nearly 40.

Managing director, David Steel, said: “The investment from UK Steel Enterprise has taken us from a predominantly manual to a fully automatic production process to meet the growing demand from existing and new customers.

“The improvement in efficiency will help us maintain production of components at a lower cost and we will share this benefit with our customers.

“It makes us much more competitive which is highly significant when we are facing the challenge of competition from emerging economies such as India, China and the Eastern bloc countries.”

With more than 20 years of experience in precision component engineering, Ronco is known for its engineering services covering design to production for high volume or small batches, prototypes and specialist items such as pivot pins.

Peter Taylor, UK Steel Enterprise’s business development manager, added: “Ronco Engineering is a strong company with an excellent management team and is poised to make significant growth.

“This investment in automated machinery is already paying dividends and we have every confidence in the company’s future. The fact that our parent company Tata Steel supplies Ronco with the raw material it needs is an additional welcome connection.”