Graeme Thomas has been appointed business development director for the LPM (large prismatic machines) division of Gosport-based Geo Kingsbury (www.geokingsbury.com).

He is responsible for promoting half of the eight German machine tool agency lines — Burkhardt + Weber, F Zimmermann, SHW and Waldrich Coburg — that the company sells exclusively in the UK and Ireland.

Based in Geo Kingsbury’s Birmingham office on the Blythe Valley Business Park, Mr Thomas joins the company from another multi-agency machine tool distributor in the Midlands, where he was latterly key account director for high-value machining centres.

He has also worked for a number of high-profile manufacturers of large-capacity prismatic metal-cutting machines (in Europe and the USA).

While undergoing his five-year apprenticeship in the mid-1980s, he gained an HNC in mechanical and production engineering; since then, his responsibilities have been many and varied, covering machine tool fitting, rebuilding, service, training, applications engineering, sales and senior management.