Petford Group

Petford Tools was founded in 1970 (its Companies House incorporation shows 17 August 1971) by chairman Mick Parr, starting out as a toolmaker operating from a single unit in Brierley Hill, in the Black Country. It later moved to its current Peartree Lane site in Dudley, a shift that kicked off a deliberate 10-year business plan built around adding injection molding capability alongside the company’s original precision tooling work, backed by investment in CAD, CNC milling, and finishing equipment.

Growth since then has been fairly steady. By 2011, in its 42nd year, Petford broke £14 million in annual sales for the first time, reporting 15% growth that year on the back of new automotive and agricultural contracts, and investing £560,000 in a 1,600-tonne injection press to expand capacity. Plastic injection molding itself had begun at Peartree Lane back in 2006, and by 2014 that side of the business had outgrown the Dudley site, prompting a £2.8 million move into a dedicated Petford Moulding operation in Brierley Hill. That operation outgrew its space too, moving again in 2017 to a new £1.5 million, four-acre site in Lye.

Funding has backed much of that expansion. Petford secured a £3.5 million investment from the Advanced Manufacturing Supply Chain Initiative in 2013, a further £1.5 million from Frontier Development Capital in 2023 under managing director Adrian Lloyd to deliver 41 injection mould tools, and separately the largest tooling loan NatWest had issued to date, £4.7 million, alongside a £2 million invoice finance facility and £1 million overdraft, under group managing director Mel Sinar.

Today Petford Group specializes in automotive tool manufacturing and plastic injection molding, supplying first- and second-tier components to UK and global OEMs, predominantly in the premium automotive and aerospace sectors, alongside rail and household work. The group employs well over 100 people across its Dudley and Lye sites, and, as its own site puts it, has spent the past 40 years building the facilities needed to offer round-the-clock support and warranty backing for the products it makes.