Dutch Co-Founders Toast New Bronkhorst UK Headquarters

Bronkhorst UK 23/11/2010

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Bronkhorst UK, a market leader in fluid metering and control instrumentation, has completed its move to spacious new premises in the home of thoroughbred horse racing, Newmarket. A wholly-owned subsidiary of Bronkhorst High-Tech BV of Holland, the company was originally established in Sawston, Cambridgeshire in 2002 and has since grown rapidly, increasing financial turnover by some 800% during that period. Having outgrown its original headquarters, it has relocated to Newmarket in order to have room for future expansion and gain access to the local pool of skilled labour, with plans to double its workforce within the next five years.

To mark the occasion, the official opening was performed by the Mayor of Newmarket, Councillor Mick Jeffrys, who welcomed the high technology enterprise to the town. Special guests were the Bronkhorst joint founders and co-owners Teus Bruggemann and Wybren Jouwsma, both of whom have been appointed Knights of the Order of Orange-Nassau, one of their home country’s highest honours for services to Dutch society.

“We have grown rapidly in terms of both sales revenue and staff numbers, even maintaining an upward trend during the recession, and our new Newmarket base gives us more valuable floorspace, good links with the travel network and a superb quality of environment, in an historic market town,” says Bronkhorst UK’s Managing Director, Andrew Mangell. “It was a great honour for the two founders to travel over for our mayoral opening and toast the next phase of our journey. They have invested substantially in growing the UK operation and their policy of spending around 15% group annual turnover on research and development means that we always have a flow of truly innovative new products to bring to the British marketplace.”

The new premises are at King’s Court on Willie Snaith Road, itself named after a leading jockey of the 1950’s, who was awarded an MBE by the late Queen Mother. The office is located within easy reach of the A14, the busy trunk road that links the UK’s largest container port and thence Europe, with the country’s industrial heartlands and London’s orbital motorway. Bronkhorst supplies virtually every customer sector in this country, taking in laboratory, university, industrial, pilot plant and hazardous area applications, and its new location will enable it to provide technical and service support even faster.

Its parent company, Bronkhorst High-Tech, was itself established in 1981 and is now recognised as offering the most advanced range of mass flow, pressure and vapour meters and controllers on the world market, its instruments playing key roles in such critical industries as semiconductors, food processing, glass production, life sciences, energy and petrochemicals, metallurgy and surface technology. Now a global organisation, it has wholly-owned operations in Holland, Germany, France, USA, Switzerland, China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea, as well as the UK, and official distributors in a further 66 countries.

A graduate of Exeter University, Andy Mangell spent six years in the international oil industry, on both exploration rigs and production facilities, before developing a technical sales career in instrumentation, eventually setting up Bronkhorst’s first UK operation. He heads up a specialist team that brings together degree-level skills in flow theory, electronics, chemistry and materials engineering, with in-depth specifying and applications expertise, enabling it to meet customers’ most challenging technical demands.