Mike Matthews, Managing Director, Nifco UK

Apr 20 2010 by Kelley Price, Evening Gazette

MIKE Matthews describes himself as an optimist, a glass half-full kind of person.

Perhaps that’s why he has stuck around to see the Japanese-owned company through the deepest dip of the recession and the darkest days of the ailing car market.

“While most other companies were retracting, we went out there and banged the drum - and it’s worked incredibly well,” he says.

It was week 42 of 2008 - he can pinpoint the exact moment - when the company’s world ‘fell off a cliff’.

“Car sales had been declining since the January,” says Mike, “but it took so long for manufacturers to react, we were still supplying product at 90% capacity.

“Overnight, that dropped to 25%.

“The banks started to fail, there was mass hysteria. We’re in a global market, we weren’t just getting the UK’s bad news but also Europe’s and North America’s.

“We work three months ahead, we had all these orders and all the labour hired yet nothing was going out the door. We were running out of cash.”

The business was forced to shed a third of its workforce.

“We had to maintain the DNA of the company. Everyone from shopfloor members to managers and engineers was lost.”

With business at an all-time low, Mike took a risk - he poured precious revenue into the sales teams.

“We had to make some difficult decisions. We took the initiative to send out our salespeople and aggressively target new business.

“I was at a forum recently and business leaders were talking about the difficulties of borrowing money at the moment. Instead of doing that, they could spend more money on your travel and sales budgets and go out and generate the cash.”

Over the last two years, the multi-award-winning Stockton company has secured more than £14m worth of new business and things have started picking up.

Around 50 staff have been taken on, many of them former Nifco workers.

The business is looking at a £27m turnover this year and £32m next year, based on work already secured, including the Ford Fiesta, Nissan and an impressive 40 parts for the new Honda Civic.

“It’s not about a paradigm shift, it’s about a steady, day to day growth,” claims Mike.

“The Japanese call it ‘kaizen’ - continuous improvement.

“You have to keep going. We want to be the number one manufacturer in Europe. Perhaps there’s no such thing, but everything we do looks at closing that gap.

“I’ve got a good team around me, with a great chemistry. Good communication and staff training is really the story of our business. I strongly believe this company in the Tees Valley can be world-class.”

A time-served toolmaker, Mike worked his way up from the shopfloor to the helm of the business.

The site has been open since 1967, but it wasn’t until 2000 that Japanese Nifco bought the previously named Elta Plastics. Tough times ensued.

“We underwent a major rebranding, but we struggled with it,” says Mike.

Nowadays the company, which makes plastic car parts from engine components to cupholders, has a global turnover of around US $1.3bn and a customer base that reads like a What Car top ten list.

And Mike is more than ready to embrace the new age of low-carbon technology.

“We make engine components, but the electric car revolution can only be good news for us. It’s becoming a reality very quickly.

“The region has been named an ultra low carbon demonstrator area and I think One North East has done a great job. There’s been a fantastic level of joined-up thinking. Hopefully, the North-east will grow intellectual property that will bring us business for years to come.

“The scrappage scheme has been phenomenal,” he adds, “it’s given us some comfort and helped us get over the deep ravine we found ourselves in. It’s helped us retain staff and helped keep the industry alive. Now confidence is returning.”

The next big step for Nifco will be another production facility ‘in the immediate vicinity’ to grow the business, shoring up jobs and converting temporary workers to permanent staff.

“We are hoping to get the right sort of support to keep work here,” says Mike, “otherwise we will have to transfer work to Nifco Poland.”

So what’s in store for UK manufacturing? In true glass-half-full fashion, Mike says the weakened value of the pound is an opportunity for manufacturers and exporters.

“Everything from the UK has become a third cheaper,” he says, “we are finding now we can even compete with the likes of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and definitely Spain, France and Germany. The UK is a very competitive place to manufacture now.

“We go by a sustainable business model, we bite the bullet and make ourselves competitive for the low cost industries.

“Japan is only a short flight away from China, they’ve been through the low-cost country threat a lot earlier than us. They know how to make themselves competitive.

“Recovery has become a way of life for Nifco, if we hadn’t had such severe problems in the early noughties, I’m convinced we wouldn’t be where we are today.”