British Instrument Manufacturers Strive to Target the Chinese Market

In a remote, leafy area in southern England, a worker is using a technique between the Vietnamese glassmaker and the Swiss watchmaker to craft a small glass ball on top of a thin tube.

John Hill claims to be a "microtechnician." He said he has been doing this work for 31 years, but "has not yet reached the level of perfection."

Hill is one of 170 British employees in the Servomex business of Spectris. Spectris is a British engineering group with revenues of £902 million ($1.49 billion) last year, 97% of which came from outside the UK.

Watch Hill's operation at the Servomex smart factory in Crowborough, East Sussex, where John Hoiggins has been in the company for 5 years.

When he was 47 years old and he was a mechanical engineer, he said: “As far as I know, not many companies can do this kind of work, and we do not want to pass this production technology to others. It is in our hands that we control it. One of the keys to staying ahead in the industry."

Servomex is a world-leading manufacturer of gas analysis equipment and is one of the 13 operating units of Spectris. These departments of Telegraph have global reach.

These departments have their own expertise in the field of professional instrumentation and measurement equipment, and the products they produce are used for industry and research.

They produce about 10,000 instruments and can be divided into 50 categories.

Among them, Servomex produces instruments for semiconductor manufacturers and medical companies.

Other departments produce systems for measuring the vibration of air molecules to monitor noise pollution, or instruments for recording the thickness of steel pipes or optical fiber cables.

Since 2002, in addition to the economic downturn in 2008-09, the profits of Spectris have grown year by year.

Analysts in the City of London projected that in 2011, the adjusted profit of Spectris will reach around 170 million pounds, a 28% increase over the previous year, five times that of 2002. Since January 2008, the stock price of Spectris has doubled.

Nearly one-third of Bulbe's 2010 revenues came from Asia, and the Chinese market contributed 13% of its revenue to Spectris. Revenue from China is growing at a rate of 15-20% per year. For this, the quietly spoken Irishman Ho Kam-ho explained that the broad macroeconomic situation is one of the reasons.

“China and other emerging economies are increasingly interested in installing automation equipment to increase production efficiency and increase investment in healthcare and safety, both of which require the use of more specialized equipment.

"So, when you read that Chinese factories use robots instead of manpower, or build new hospitals or pollution monitoring stations, these two types of behavior are generally beneficial to us."

Most parts of Spectris focus on narrow product areas. Servomex is an example. Like most departments in the group, Servomex has only a handful of competitors around the world.

A key component of most of Servomex's products is a small sensor made by Hill that can cost up to 1,000 pounds.

The sensor relies on the almost imperceptible movement of small glass spheres (about 2 mm in diameter), which are offset by the gas molecules due to magnetic forces.

From the slight deviation of the small glass spheres, the gas content of a mixture can be measured with an accuracy of 0.01%.

Like most of Spectris, most of Servomex's production processes rely on external contractors.

Servomex's main factory in Kroborough Township, and a small factory in Boston, Massachusetts, are responsible for the final assembly of the product.

He Jinxi said: "In addition to more professional production processes, we mainly focus on technology research and development and marketing. These are our competitive advantages."

Correspondingly, Spectris owns less than one-third of the employees in the production process in its 6,000 employees worldwide (including 800 in the UK).

There are 2,000 sales staff. One of the main tasks is to track customer's new requirements in the instrument and then feedback to the Production Development Department. The Production Development Department has more than 500 people.

About three-quarters of the employees are located in high-cost regions, including Western Europe, North America, and Japan. He said that this ratio will not change much in the next few years.

“Although we are expanding our revenues faster in emerging economies, given the expertise we need, our employees in developed regions may still be the majority.”