The NEAA catches up with Keith Jackson, Automotive Account Manager, to talk about Omega Plastics Group, the NEAA and all things injection moulding…
Can you give an overview of the current business and how you fit in to both the automotive sector and the wider market?
Omega Plastics Group provide high quality injection mould tooling, components, assembly, and technical solutions to a wide range of customers in the Automotive, Industrial and Technical, Medical, and Consumer Products sectors. We have two trading companies in our group, Omega Plastics based in Gateshead and Signal Plastics based in Washington.
Omega Plastics started out as rapid toolmakers nearly 25 years ago – initially based in Team Valley Gateshead, expanding to a new site in Blyth in 2009 then to a second site in Hartlepool in 2011. Over the last decade, Omega developed its technical capability to include single and multi-impression production tooling and now has one of the largest toolrooms in the UK.
In 2015, we added specialist high volume moulding capability to the group by acquiring Signal Plastics. In 2016, Signal moved into larger premises in Washington and in 2019, Omega consolidated to a larger facility and group headquarters in Gateshead.
A new group management team was appointed in 2019. Since then, despite challenging conditions, the group has seen an exciting period of growth. That includes record turnover in both 2021 and 2022 and headcount increasing from 90 to 170.
Omega’s toolroom comprises 22 tooling engineers, designers, and project managers. Omega also has 15 moulding machines from 40T to 300T supplying a combination of lower volume batch and serial production components to customers across multiple sectors. Signal Plastics has 15 injection moulding machines from 100T to 1300T, supporting higher volume and serial production programmes, focusing on the automotive sector.
The automotive sector accounts for more than half of our sales. We operate at different levels in the supply chain, ranging from North East Tier One Automotive customers to lower volume niche OEM Automotive customers. We supply components from tools manufactured by us, offshore tooling projects that we have managed, or tools transferred into us from our Tier 1 customer base.
