Open House orders are icing on the cake for XYZ's 30th anniversary celebrations

But even before the event began, the party had already started for XYZ with the announcement that April had been the best ever month for sales in its 30-year history. "The combination of MACH and the buoyant manufacturing economy resulted in a fantastic month for us," said Nigel Atherton, managing director, XYZ Machine Tools. "With sales of 110 machines totalling £3,560,000, April was the best month ever for the business. This success gave us the ideal opportunity to celebrate at our open house, which also coincided with our biennial European distributor meeting, where we took the opportunity to enthuse our 12 distributors with the potential benefits of the ProtoTRAK system and the overall value of XYZ Machine Tools." With sales from the European region only accounting for 10% of XYZ's turnover (or the same as Scotland, an area that has only had direct XYZ representation for 12 months), the potential for sales growth is huge. Mr Atherton underlined this opportunity to the distributors: "When XYZ introduced the ProtoTRAK control system in 1993, it was just me and Kerry Kidd with a demo box each. That year we sold 402 units. Within four years, we had grown that side of the business to over 900 units a year with six sales people and three applications engineers. We are extremely keen to develop our European sales and plan to have a Tier One distributor in every European country by the end of 2014, each with their own XYZ showroom and demonstration machines accompanied by a dedicated salesman for the XYZ range." Supporting this growth will be Andrew Kilshaw, XYZ's export sales manager who will work closely with the distribution network, providing training and support where necessary. There were other winners at XYZ Machine Tools' event, too, with London theatre breaks being raffled in a prize draw. These were picked up by representatives of Helipebs, MGB Engineering, Project 01 and Trathen Engineering.