TANFIELD is confident it is turning the corner and will shortly return to growth as its order book picks up after the blight of the recession.

The Washington-based company is concentrating on cherry-picker manufacture after selling its electric van business to American associate company Smith Electric Vehicles US (Sevus) for £9.4m.

Its latest results, for the year to the end of December, do not include the electric vehicles even though the business owns around a third of Sevus.

The figures showed turnover at £43.5m and a fall in operating losses from £16m in 2009 to £15.8m in 2010.

But chief executive Darren Kell said the substantial scale of orders received in the first quarter of this year meant he was confident of recovery.

He said: “It is a year of transition. Clearly, we’re coming off the back of, in our industry, the severest recession on record and we’re starting to see positive signs of growth.

“It’s very difficult to switch from being in a recessionary environment to a growth environment. That’s why we see 2011 as a transition.”

The company is currently recruiting a handful of specialised staff but Kell said that if the recovery continued, there would be more jobs created. The upturn is being fuelled by customers returning to the market after the recession and their need to replace old equipment.

Kell said: “Many customers had a moratorium on capital expenditure. They were unwilling to spend – and unable because of the credit crunch and lack of available credit, a contributor to the scale of the recession. They are now able to start funding from cashflow rather than credit.

“You can put off buying equipment for a period but it starts to break down. That’s where we’re at with many of our larger customers. We are seeing significant enough robustness to underpin our growth.”