The growing demand for lightweight structures has resulted in a £4 million sales boost for one of Coventry’s fastest-growing companies.

Penso, which provides a turn-key engineering service (www.penso.uk.com), has seen its turnover surpass £20 million after winning a host of contracts from car makers, railway companies and defence contractors keen to benefit from its design, feasibility analysis, composite and niche production capabilities.

Following the increase in orders, the company has built a second engineering centre in Coventry and taken on 60 new employees, a quarter of whom are local graduates and apprentices. The company announced this news on the day that the 3,000th Mercedes Vito taxi rolled off its Woodhams Road production line.

Group sales and marketing director Michael Collins said: “Providing the next generation of engineering solutions is our ‘unique selling point’, and this is something that we are using in the automotive sector to great effect. Opportunities are being created by car makers that need to comply with the directive to reduce carbon emissions further by 2020, with huge fines if they don’t comply.

"One answer is to make their vehicles lighter — akin to the technologies being used in F1 and aerospace — but this has only ever been done in low volumes and it can be a drawn-out process. The real technology challenge is to find a way of improving cycle times while ensuring that it is suitable for mass production.”

After years of R&D, Penso has developed a unique process for making carbon fibre components that offer the same performance — or better — than their existing counterparts, with manufacturing times of just minutes that make the use of composite materials very competitive against the traditional steels, aluminium and mixed materials commonly used in the automotive sector.

“This technology will open up lightweight structures for the high-volume market — a breakthrough that nobody has successfully managed yet within the UK. It is already attracting industry attention as part of Jaguar Land Rover’s Varcity (vehicle architectures for City Cars) project, which will work towards developing the next generation of even lighter vehicles.”