Equipment investment creates growth & jobs for RSD Pressings

Investment in a new state-of-the-art equipment is helping a Cannock automotive supplier win over £750,000 of new contracts.

RSD Pressings, which supplies components for seats, sub-frames, cross car beams, bumpers and body, has installed a new Chin Fong Progression Press and can now take on much bigger parts for tier 1 customers and major car manufacturers.

Nearly £350,000 has been spent on the machine and a Tomac coil line, with more than £100,000 of funding secured from Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire Grants 4 Growth and the European Regional Development Fund.

Daniel Burton from RSD Pressings with Russell Hartill from Worcester Presses / Picture: RSD

Three new jobs have already been created as a result of the investment and a further eight will be recruited over the course of the next twelve months once production starts on the projects already secured.

“The components we manufacture at our new facility in Cannock end up in millions of cars all over the world, including Aston Martin, BMW, Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan and Volvo,” explained Daniel Burton, Operations Director at RSD Pressings.

“We recognised the opportunity to expand our product offering by acquiring a press with a much bigger bed size and had been impressed with the reliability and performance of the OCP 260 tonne Chin Fong we purchased a few years ago.”

He went on to add: “This machine has doubled our bed size and has already led to several new orders that we wouldn’t have been able to take on previously. There is still lots of capacity on it too, which means we are looking for even more new work.”

RSD Pressings, which boasts annual sales of £5m and employs 50 people at its state-of-the-art facility in Cannock, has worked with Dudley-based Worcester Presses, who supplied the equipment, for more than five years.

Russell Hartill, Director of Worcester Presses, added his support: “The GTX is a state-of-the-art press in every sense of the word and offers fantastic performance, reliability and, with the large bed size, capacity.

As part of its expansion, it has recently recruited an additional service engineer, taking its total workforce to 14.