George Osborne has opened a new factory as a three generation Northwest engineering firm flies in the face of the recession.

Expanding family firm Cygnet Group is not only actively recruiting and on the lookout for new investment and incubation engineering projects, but on Friday February 27th 2009 moved into 18,500 sqft of purpose-built factory and office premises. At 11am George Osborne will officially open Swan House, the first completed new build on the New Cheshire Business Park in Northwich.

Betty Kimpton (92), widow of the company’s original post-WW2 founder, and grandmother of the current Managing Director, raised a toast with the Shadow Chancellor to celebrate her family’s ongoing success.

The diverse international business that Cygnet represents today owes its beginnings to William Harry Kimpton who formed WHK Products to manufacture creels and beaming machines for the once thriving Lancashire cotton industry, for a time working from the same floors at Styal Mill that now house the National Trust museum. Today’s MD Matthew Kimpton-Smith can remember being allowed to turn on the Styal water wheel as a boy, but never imagined the path that would lead him to head up a rapidly growing engineering group.

In the early 1970s his parents, Colin and Janet Smith, focused on the creels side of the business, turning to the growing market for more technical fibres by starting Texkimp Limited, which now has 99% of its sales overseas, whilst maintaining virtually all of its manufacturing in the UK, predominantly in the North West. The overseas markets penetrated by Texkimp cover the globe, ranging from the developing economies of China, India and Vietnam to the mature markets of North America and Western Europe, across to Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Texkimp remains a crucial subsidiary of Cygnet Group which, under Matthew, has diversified into a group of engineering companies providing bespoke engineered solutions to niche global markets. By investing in the true incubation of ideas for manufactured products, Cygnet bridges the commercial gap between a great idea and a commercially successful mature product. The Cygnet team of almost 50, predominantly engineers, boasts decades of experience developing and manufacturing products and machinery from metals and plastics and a strong network of sub-suppliers from fabrication to financial, intellectual property and marketing experts.

Cygnet’s ability to turn great ideas into commercial reality is demonstrated in the development of threadless pipe-joining technology from the inventive mind of a Manchester University lab-technician, into connectors for both sub-sea and marine oil & gas applications, to the quick-connector world of fluid power. SECC Oil & Gas’ environmental and operator friendly connectors for hoses and umbilicals are now attracting orders from around the world.

There was an air of celebration and hope in Cheshire in February as George Osborne opened the first new build on the New Cheshire Business Park.

Swan House is the new home to the expanding Cygnet Group of engineering companies which are actively recruiting staff, and on the lookout for new investment projects, even during these tough economic times. Managing Director Matthew Kimpton-Smith showed the Shadow Chancellor around the £2 million, environmentally-friendly building taking him through the 3,500 sq ft of open plan office space and into two workshops totalling 15,000 sq ft.

Firstly he was shown Texkimp’s creels. These fibre unwinding machines are large frameworks designed to feed fibre into various manufacturing processes such as making carpet backing, the innards of tyres and the carbon fibres that go into the panels of the new generation Boeing 787 Dreamliner and new Airbus A350. Texkimp is the bedrock of the Cygnet Group, founded in the 1940s by Matthew’s grandfather William Harry Kimpton, and regenerated as Texkimp Ltd by his parents, Colin and Janet Smith, in the early 1970s. Colin and Janet still work for the company and today Texkimp proves that some areas of UK engineering manufacturing are still alive and well – the creels are 99% UK manufactured and 99% exported to almost every continent of the world.

In the second workshop George Osborne will then encounter one of Cygnet’s new ventures, SECC with its impressive threadless pipe joining technology. On display will be their new oil and gas pipe coupling designed to protect the environment by preventing spillage in the event of a pipeline break in the harsh sub-sea and marine world. This idea has been developed from the inventive mind of a Manchester University lab technician, Matthew Readman, and then incubated and grown through the collective decades of experience in the Cygnet team of engineers, to a commercially viable product that’s now attracting orders from around the globe.

Matthew Kimpton-Smith called George Osborne to strip away the red tape that strangles small businesses and to develop policies that make it easier, not harder, for small firms to grow and employ even more local people.

The full compliment of almost 50 staff members shared in a toast along with some further 45 guests, invited because of their contribution to the success to date of the Cygnet Group of companies. Betty Kimpton, 92 year old widow of the original founder was a guest of honour, alongside George Osborne who will present a plaque to mark the official opening.

Notes: It took three years to find the site and 18 months to design and build the £2 million, 18,500 sq ft Swan House. The New Cheshire Business Park will eventually boast some 250,000 sq ft of factory, warehouse and office units in Wincham, near Northwich, Cheshire, close to the M6, M56 and Daresbury Science and Technology Facilities Council. Many of the buildings from 1891 have already been restored as part of the regeneration of the New Cheshire Salt Works, and some already house other businesses which are also recruiting locally.