Rotary Visits Komatsu

 

 WHITLEY BAY ROTARY ON THE ROAD AGAIN

In recent months the club was fortunate enough to have been given the opportunity to listen to Maria Dimova an engineer from Bulgaria, working for Komatsu Construction Equipment, Birtley, Chester le Street.

So on a bright sunny Friday morning club members and guests were invited to view the production line based the huge site in Birtley. Our host for the morning was John Lawson – Public Relations Officer UK and a Komatsu staff member for some thirty years plus.

The company was originally founded in 1921 to manufacture machine tools and mining equipment for the Takeuchi Mining Company founded in 1894. However, in 1921 the company separated and became Komatsu Ltd as it was based in a town called Komatsu: here it built its first major piece of machinery in 1931 - a 450 ton Hydraulic Press. This was quickly followed by Japan's first crawler type farm tractor in 1934 which developed a caterpillar traction system. In the subsequent year it was listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and expanded its production interests over the years to producing high grade castings, bulldozers, earth moving equipment, fork lift and dump trucks and special purpose vehicles etc.

In the early 1960’s it opened up a plant in the United States followed by a worldwide expansion programme before moving to the UK and converting the old Caterpillar plant based in Birtley in 1986.

The abiding memory of our visit would have been not only the scale of the production site, but the continual emphasis on quality control and the incredible staff loyalty.
So, after a long morning we retired to the excellent Tavistock Italia for lunch and returned home to Whitley by mid-afternoon.

If you are interested in finding out more about Whitley Bay Rotary Club, please contact us either on enquiries@whitleybayrotaryclub.co.uk or by telephoning 07419 736989.