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Polish promise

11th November 2004
Page 44
Page 44, 11th November 2004 — Polish promise
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Having bought the Thompson Carmichael factory in Bilston in 1998, four months ago Heil ultimately decided the plant was too old, and needed too much investment to meet ever tougher health & safety conditions. Thus, Bllston will close by the end of the year with the reported loss of 100 jobs and production of Neil's ADR 5000 Series petroleum tankers will be switched to Poland in a co-operative agreement with the Belgian manufacturer Stokota, which operates a trailer assembly plant at Elbiag near Gdansk. "It will be exactly the same product," says Dalton who also reports the increasing difficulty of getting skilled labour in the UK. When we've recently advertised for welders, we've had taxi drivers applying! The area in Poland we're moving to has a large number of highly skilled sheet metal workers and welders."

The shift to Poland raised the spectre that UK fleets would be wary of a non-UK built product. The first thing we worried about was that people would say We always bought Heil because it was a British tanker" says Dalton, before adding: "But customers have said it's fine as long as the tankers are still Heil."

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