After a life time’s service to the machine tool industry, Stephen Le Beau, group marketing director for 600 Group, is retiring.
Dr LeBeau, who, earlier this year, was awarded the first MTA Outstanding Service Award to be given to a non-member of staff, has spent the last 16 years guiding and managing the marketing of The 600 Group.
During that time he has participated in a multitude of changes within the Group. When he first joined, 600 Centre, the Group’s UK distributor, was yet to be conceived; Colchester and Harrison were two separate companies manufacturing under one roof; the radical Tornado was not even on the drawing board; and the Alpha not yet developed.
In addition to prompting and overseeing such influential changes within the Group’s market presence, he was instrumental in providing the market research which was the basis for the current business strategy, introduced some two years ago. He was pivotal in both the development and implementation of that strategy.
Dr LeBeau joined 600 Group originally as product strategy and marketing director from the position of sales director at Yamazaki Machine Tools. Prior to that he was sales and marketing director of Bridgeport (previously Adcock Shipley), where he had been prominent in the introduction of CNC machining centres. He achieved his PhD, a study on the introduction of CNC to the market, at Aston University.
“I have devoted my working life to responding to the challenges and scaling the heights of the machine tool industry and achieving routes to best practice in production,” Dr LeBeau said. “I now look forward to the opportunity of dedicating my time to meeting the challenges and heights of the great outdoors” - he leaves the industry to pursue his other great love, mountaineering and walking in the wilder parts of the world.
Dr LeBeau is a Fellow of the Institute of Mechanical Engineering and also a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, ands his machine tool career was kick-started nearly 40 years ago through the (then) MTTA’s Graduate Training M. Sc. Programme at Birmingham University.
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