Steelways is primarily a manufacturer of precision sheet steel products, with Factories in both UK and Germany.

Steelways was founded in 1997 and is fully owned by its UK Directors and has grown steadily to a staff of 50 people and a Europe-wide presence in its main product areas.

These main products divide into Cable Management systems and Building and Site Equipment.

Steelways is the sole approved Cable Trunking supplier for Honda and for the Ford Premier Automotive Group in Europe, which includes Land Rover, Jaguar, Volvo and Aston Martin. All these companies have recent installations from Steelways we are currently processing various projects with these customers.

Cable management products represent about 70% of turnover and Building and Site Equipment Products the balancing 30%. However sales in Site Equipment are growing at about 25% per annum. Steelways sees much of its future growth in this area and 3 to 5 new internally developed and manufactured products are being added each year. Extra products or components are also being added by direct import from Eastern Europe or China, when these suppliers are particularly competitive.

However, there are real customer benefits from European manufacturing and Steelways continues to invest in it in both UK and in Germany. Both Factories contain full production lines, able to work from basic metal sheet and tube to finished, painted, assembled and packed products. Amongst other things, Steelways product and process ownership means better security of supply and better cost control than that offered by pure importers of finished goods.

Design and development is carried out on state of the art 2D and 3D Computer aided design systems with full time design staff here and in Germany. Product design can be directly downloaded from the CAD systems onto Computer controlled production machines in both locations, which reduces lead times and mistakes and also allows us to produce small run customised items or one-offs.

Steelways will also continue to import components from lower cost areas and combine them with our products. We have developed this process with Site Lighting over the last two or three years and our aim in doing so is to retain the turnaround time, quality and flexibility of locally finished products while answering the need to remain price competitive.

Compared to our competition in the Site Lighting and equipment area, Steelways are not completely reliant on importing finished Chinese or Indian products. We can thus afford to carry higher stocks of the materials we do import, such as cable, lighting heads or lamps. We also have second sourcing on the largest volume components, to further protect supply.

Increasing sales volumes are providing the means for Steelways to continue to improve distribution of the Products both in UK and Europe.As well as operating our own HGV’s and Light delivery Vans in UK and Germany, we have a separate warehouse dedicated to Lighting equipment, carrying stock of all line items.