Citizen Machinery takes over £2.6 million at three-day event; more to follow

Drawing over 200 visitors, the event's order tally took in 13 machines, with one existing customer committing a spend of £750,000 for a turnkey engineering project involving three Citizen top-of-the-range M32 CNC sliding-head turn-mill centres and one Miyano fixed-head turning centre. The company, Lemac, based in East Lothian, is expanding its production facility, due mainly to an unprecedented growth in some business sectors, with this year-on-year growth predicted to continue. Indeed, it intends to increase production by 25% in 2014. The company selected both Citizen and Miyano machines so it will be able to compete against other manufacturers, worldwide, via automation, fast set-up and changeover and high levels of machining consistency. Lemac CNC technical manager David Banham said: "The decision to buy Citizen sliding-head and the fixed-head automated cell was also based on Citizen's technical input to provide turnkey applications and a proven track record in our company with an existing Citizen L16 and two Citizen M32 machines." Overall, orders were placed for nine new Citizen CNC sliding-head machines, three Miyano fixed-head turn-mill centres and one pre-owned Citizen, with more expected to follow. Said Geoff Bryant, managing director: "We have very positive enquiries for the latest machines from both product lines launched at the event, so our sales and applications team will certainly add to the order intake over the next few weeks." He added: "With so many other machine tool industry open houses being staged, OEMs and subcontract companies were being very selective on devoting time to attend events. We were very pleased, not only at the number of people who came along, but the level of confidence they were showing in the future and therefore the seriousness of the intention to invest."