Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

Antonov, a designer of cutting-edge automotive transmissions, wants to harvest the highly skilled crop of UK expertise from the fields of the Motorsport Valley so it can fulfil the demands of a fresh surge of client programmes.

The company has already begun the process of moving production programmes out of its Paris Technical Centre where its research and development work is carried out and to a facility in Snetterton, Norfolk, near its existing Thetford base.

Antonov presently employs about a dozen UK staff, but is looking at doubling the figure over the coming months. A second UK facility may also be opened around Warwick or Coventry with the emphasis squarely on the recruitment of highly talented individuals.

“The decision to base this team in the UK has been driven by the availability of suitable staff and service providers, said John Moore, Antonov’s chief executive officer whose task for the last two years has been to focus the company on meeting the requirements of clients and build it into a profitmaking business.

“The East of England and the West Midlands have the right people with the right skills,” he added.

Revenues for 2006 were only £30,000, a fall of £45,000 on the previous year.

However, its pre-tax loss was reduced by over £2.6 million during this period and the reassessment of how it handles its production programmes is a further part of this streamlining process.

This has meant the operational focus for 2006 has been on the delivery of its TX6 and RTX production programmes, which are currently run from the Paris Technical Centre though predominantly by UK staff who commute on a weekly basis.

The decision to change came after Antonov’s chief executive officer, John Moore, found that the demands of production programmes were very different from the conceptual engineering work previously undertaken by the Paris team and that this had shown up some “weaknesses” in the internal organisation early in 2006.

“Rapid action was taken to correct this,” said Moore. “Both strengthening the production engineering team and downsizing the conceptual engineering team to control costs.

“By the year end, nine technical and two administrative posts had been made redundant in the French subsidiary.

“Antonov technology has now made the transition from interesting concepts to production applications.

“This transition has also required significant changes in the way the company operates, but by the end of Q1 2007 the programme work will have been relocated to its new home in the UK and the team continues to be strengthened as we recruit talented engineers into the team.”

Moore believes these changes will serve to continue the good progress of the production programmes, which he says are on course to generate significant revenues in 2007 and also enable the company to scale up for further opportunities and new contracts which Antonov is currently seeking.

He said: “The consolidation of the programme engineering into a new UK facility will enable the company to attract the talent needed to deliver these programmes successfully.

“Permanent recruitment is underway to provide the core skills needed to ensure reliable and cost effective delivery of production programmes. This will be supplemented with strategic outsourcing to cover specialist skills and intermittent resource demand.”

Antonov was originally created to develop the inventions of its founder, Roumen Antonov. It now holds a broad intellectual property portfolio in mechanical power transmission. Its TX6 six speed automatic transmission programme is based on the grant of a Production Licence Agreement to China’s leading car manufacturer, Geely.

It is working with them to develop a six speed automatic transmission based on its AAD technology, an innovative automatic power transmission which delivers, amongst other performance and mechanical benefits, the potential for increased fuel efficiency at high speeds and lower build cost.

The RTX two-speed supercharger drive is a compact auto-shifting two speed drive unit based on the Antonov’s AMM technology for use with engine superchargers. The unit increases the torque output from an engine at low speeds, thereby delivering increased performance.

This unit is being produced by NZWL in Leipzig and is being marketed through distributors in the US and Europe.