Family engineering firm grows sales and workforce

Turnover at Gloucestershire-based Arc Energy Resources topped £5 million for the first time in 2008, with managing director Alan Robinson reporting a 32% increase to £5.1 million. Arc is a specialist in anticorrosion engineering, providing weld overlay cladding and fabrication services for equipment and components used in hostile environments such as the oil & gas, chemical, water, waste treatment, nuclear and defence industries. Commenting on other milestones in a significant year, Robinson, whose wife Rosemary is the company’s finance director, said staff numbers had increased to 72 with the appointment of a new sales manager, two new project managers and the couple’s son Andrew, who joins the family business from the University of Nottingham with a degree in economics. He will focus on procurement, to rationalise the purchasing functions of the company’s fabrication and weld overlay cladding divisions. The company’s factory and offices space has increased from an original 3,000 sq ft when the business began in 1994, to more than 30,000 sq ft today. Arc Energy has also applied to patent an innovative pipe manipulation system designed to increase the efficiency and quality of its corrosion resistant coating services. The company says pipe positioning and manipulation are the most challenging aspects of the weld overlay cladding process and claims its new system significantly improves the efficiency of the process and the quality of the finished coating. The patent is one of several developments resulting from an on-going investment in R&D, designed to benefit Arc Energy’s specialised weld overlay cladding and fabrication businesses.