‘Tyrone can be rightly proud of its engineering excellence’

By Stephen Kelly

Chief Executive of Manufacturing NI

News of potential redundancies at Terex at locations across Tyrone are obviously unsettling for everyone involved and I am sure that the company will be all it can to ensure that colleagues potentially impacted are engaged, informed, and supported.

Terex is a huge success story for Tyrone and Northern Ireland. Arriving nine months after the signing of the Belfast / Good Friday Agreement with the purchase of the Powerscreen business, the global player has invested multiple times since in several locations and now extending its local workforce to almost 2,100 people.

They continue to innovate and invest and rightfully regarded as the industry standard in production of mobile the materials handling equipment.

An entire new industry has been born and Tyrone dominates the world in the production of mobile and fixed equipment which crushes, screens and sorts materials as wide as virgin minerals to construction materials to waste.

Dozens of successful homegrown businesses have been born by industry leaders inspired by their experiences and expertise secured by working for the company and alongside them is a local supply chain which has successfully supplied into these businesses and extended to securing a customer base across the globe.

Difficult news like this week and other reports of smaller levels of redundancies in other firms are obviously unsettling but the experience of the last 40 years, particularly the last 20, does tell us that businesses exposed to the ebbs and flows of global markets understand that these markets are cyclical.

The past 12 months may show were in the middle, perhaps even the depths of a trough, but in time it returns to the peaks we’ve experienced particularly since Covid.

The solutions provided by this world class engineering cluster will continue to be in demand and given that we’re moving into a new era of resource efficiency, that demand will continue to grow over time in not just Europe by also the US, Middle East and Asia.

Tyrone can be rightly proud of its globally renowned engineering excellence over the last number of decades and be confident that success will continue to flow.

Stephen Kelly is the chief executive of Manufacturing NI.