A Wiltshire company has secured more than £7 million of funding to begin mass-producing its range of carbon-fibre and carbon-composite wheels.

Chippenham-based Dymag (www.dymag.com) plans to use the investment from the Advanced Manufacturing Supply Chain Initiative (AMSCI) to accelerate its product-development programme and reduce manufacturing times. The project will be carried out in collaboration with the National Composites Centre in Bristol.

Chris Shelley, chief executive of Dymag, said that the company will initially target the high-performance and racing-car after-market and intends to supply vehicle manufacturers in the future.

He added: “We aim to increase production from a few thousand wheels a year to hundreds of thousands by 2017, and we will be opening a new factory during the next 12 months to accommodate our production facility, potentially creating around 250 new jobs at full capacity.

"We also plan to establish one or more long-term strategic manufacturing partners in the UK and overseas, to help us continue to scale up and develop the business globally.

“Over the past 12 months, BMW, Ford and several other car and motorcycle manufacturers have announced — or are working on — carbon-composite wheel programmes, with BMW publicly stating that traditional alloy wheels will eventually become obsolete. This is a huge opportunity to make carbon-composite wheels a mainstream product, and to make Dymag one of the primary suppliers globally.

“Dymag is one of 20 projects across England to win AMSCI funding designed to help re-build the British manufacturing sector, strengthen the supply chain and boost economic growth. There was stiff competition to win this investment, so I am delighted that we have been successful. The funding is a huge endorsement of our work to date.

We are now completing an Enterprise Investment Scheme financial investment round that will provide the matching funds to enable Dymag to fully utilise this grant funding, which is a key condition of the award.”