James Hurley spoke to Business Development Executive Geoff Gamage and General Manager Charlie Warner

Written by James Hurley & Produced by Sean Quantrill

In 1984, Maxell established facilities in Telford specifically to manufacture video cassettes for the merging market followed 4 years later by a further expansion of the facility to manufacture both audio cassettes and floppy discs.

As media steadily migrated to digital formats, and low cost manufacturing became an increasingly viable option, the company moved some of its manufacturing operations for new products abroad. Products then began to come over from the Far East in bulk, leaving the Telford operation to simply load magnetic materials, print and package them.

This left a fairly sophisticated manufacturing operation facing a crisis. To take advantage of this capacity, the company now operates an extensive OEM moulding shop that offers a precision injection moulding, as well as an assembly and packaging service, to the automotive, pest control and health-care industries.

Catalyst for change

Maxell^™ plant in Telford was purpose built for the manufacture of VHS video cassettes in 1984. To take advantage of tariffs set up by the EU to reduce imports from the Far East, the company went through a period of ramping up its UK capacity, and, four years later, a significant extension was completed which allowed the facility to manufacture the other main magnetic tape products, floppy disks and audio cassettes.

Those three principle products were the backbone of the company approaching the new millennium, remembers Charlie Warner, who has been with the company since 1983.

As time moved on, technologies changed and cost has been driven out of the product to the extent that it became profitable to outsource the manufacture of the raw components to the Far East. We quickly realised that was going to leave us with a large number of injection moulding machines that would be redundant unless we found a new use for them.

With the decline in our traditional product, we began to realise that the skills, technology and machinery that we had in house could be put to better use. At the same time, it was considered unlikely that our European base would be used for any new products because of the cost benefits of low cost manufacturing bases in the Far East. Our future was very uncertain.

This, says Warner, left the company looking for a catalyst for change. An opportunity arose in 1998 via one of our partners who supplied the metal components that were used in our cassettes.

"They were also doing work for the Rover group, and they asked us if we could over-mould a car horn button. We proved we could do this competitively and to a high standard, and that was a turning point.

OEM work

While the core operations of the company remain focused on its own branded products, the balance in Telford did begin to gradually shift towards winning third party injection moulding and packaging contracts.

By the year 2000, when Maxell had accepted more OEM work and was seeing that its existing magnetic tape products were certain to disappear, it rebranded itself as MMS (Maxell Moulded Services).

Now everything we manufacture in this division is OEM. Our customers are placed in a variety of industry sectors, primarily in the automotive, pest control and medical sectors.

While manufacturing for the medical sector currently represents only a minority of its activities, the company is hoping to see expansion here shortly, thanks to another outmoded media.

We used to produce mini-discs, which required a sterile environment. This means we have two clean rooms, which is a facility you won^™ find in every manufacturing area, says Gamage.

Eastern influence

Maxell is 51 percent owned by the Japanese battery and multi-media giant Hitachi. While it has clearly been all change at the facilities in Telford in recent years, the company has retained something of the culture the Japanese ownership inspired.

Work practices utilised during the exclusive manufacturing of Maxell products have certainly carried on into our third party work, says Business Development Executive Geoff Gamage.

We pride ourselves on following the manual to the letter.

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