Renishaw, the engineering giant that has centres in Gloucestershire could be about to move operations from another site to the New Mills Headquarters in Wotton.

The announcement comes from the company themselves as they revealed they were looking at plans to reorganise its additive manufacturing (AM) business by co-locating its AM engineering, marketing and commercial activities from another site in Stone, Staffordshire.

As part of this proposed consolidation of activities, the company’s site at Stone would close at the end of the year.

Renishaw is beginning a collective consultation process with 120 affected employees at the Stone site.

If it is decided to close the Stone site, it is hoped that the level of redundancies would be reduced by a number of the affected employees taking up new positions which would be available in Gloucestershire.

These employees would be supported with relocation packages.

“We have invested heavily in all aspects of AM system design and are very pleased with the market adoption of the RenAM 500Q multi-laser machine”, said William Lee, Renishaw’s Chief Executive.

“We have exciting plans for future systems that will further boost the adoption of AM for series production, but in a competitive global business we need to be agile and efficient in how we bring these new technologies to market.

“Our current thinking is that the most effective way to achieve this would be for our AM technical and commercial teams to be co-located in our Gloucestershire facilities.

"The AM team at the Stone site has made a major contribution to our progress and we sincerely hope that a large number of them would relocate to our headquarters site if the closure goes ahead.”

The Gloucestershire headquarters site could be expanded if this goes ahead.