Not only does it manufacture almost everything in its Crawley factory (soon to be factories plural), but all its components, manufacturing machines and even machine tools are made in Britain too, and it outsources to British suppliers when needed.
The company is the largest supplier of mercury arc and UV curing systems to the narrow web label sector, and it also makes systems for litho presses and digital presses, as well as wider flexo presses for flexible packaging. Non-print applications include lamps for industrial coatings, direct-to-object decoration and industrial coatings. About 95% of all its products are exported.
“Our biggest market is narrow-web, then sheetfed offset, then various coaters for making label materials,” says Robert Rae, managing director of sales. “What we call ‘specials’ is for everything else; these tend to be complicated integrations, medical, etc – low volume, high complexity.
The UV-LED curing units for RMGT’s litho presses use lamps, fittings and mounts all designed and made by GEW. The Komori showroom in Europe also has a GEW ArcLED system installed. “We can’t say anything more than that but read into that what you will,” says Rae.
High-speed moving-flatbed inkjet manufacturer Inca Digital, now part of Agfa, is one of GEW’s largest digital customers for mercury lamps.
Bounce back after Covid
GEW is just over 30 years old, during which time it’s grown into a very large operation that turned over £65m in the year up to June. It’s been showing healthy year-on-year growth since way back and has recovered well from the Covid blip suffered by pretty well every company except PPE suppliers. At present it employs 150 people across the world, up by about 25 from this time last year. It has offices in Germany and the US as well as sales and service agents worldwide.
Some 95% of its production is exported. “Europe and the US are the biggest markets, where a lot of the printing machines are manufactured,” says Rae. “Elsewhere India and China are big markets for end-user business, and Japan for machinery manufacturers.”
So did Brexit pose many problems? “Since Brexit in 2021 we’ve had three record years in a row,” says Rae. “Up to the end of June we’ve done quite a lot more than last year. In fact we’ve seen record numbers since Covid/Brexit – we are 40% bigger now than before Brexit.
Product lines
The company makes arc lamps for widths up to 2.5m, or 1.7m with LED. Mercury arc is still the majority seller for GEW and it remains very widely used worldwide still, despite LEDs getting all the current publicity for their attractive combinations of low power usage, instant switching, low temperatures and very long lives.
“There is a huge installed base of mercury lamps, so the change per year is only a small percentage of the total,” says Rae. “We are still a long way from replacing every mercury application with LEDs, and they are not viable for everything. But for a growing percentage of applications, LEDs are good.”
GEW currently has two families of UV-LEDs: LeoLED, which uses water cooling and chillers to support high-output lamps, and since September, Aero LED, which is air cooled and only needs fans and ducting, but runs with lower power and narrower maximum lamp widths. Air cooled is only available for up to 65cm. LeoLED is water cooled, so can be wider.
About six years ago GEW introduced interchangeable fittings called ArcLED, with its versatile Rhino power supply allowing arc and LED to be switched just by swapping the lamp cassettes.
Retrofits from mercury to LED are a big and growing business. “One customer is retrofitting 73 machines to LEDs – that’s 650 lamps,” says Rae.
GEW works particularly closely with inks and coatings manufacturers, as there’s a delicate balance between the sensitivity of the photo initiators that trigger curing, and the wavelengths of the UV lamps that trigger the photo initiators.
High-tech automation
Almost every part is manufactured or assembled in the UK in GEW’s highly automated factories: touchscreens, power supplies, cabinets, lamps, cabling and mechanical parts. Some electronic and electrical work is outsourced to other UK specialists, but even there they are made to GEW’s own designs and specifications. About the only things imported are the UV-emitting diodes it builds into its own curing lamp units.
“Even our software cloud monitors are hosted in the UK,” says Rae. “We really are a British company. When we stamp something ‘Made in the UK,’ it really is. We’re proud of that and we think it’s a competitive advantage. Some customers assume that we buy in India or China to keep our prices competitive. One of our biggest customers just won’t believe that we make it all! But buying British doesn’t have to break the bank – we are known as a cost-effective supplier.”
He adds that “We’ve invested heavily in moving the way we manufacture forwards. We’ve moved very fast in LEDs. They are 40% of our volume and we’ve made 2,000-plus LED units since the start of 2023. This is high-tech, high-volume manufacturing. You just can’t make LEDs by hand, you have to invest in automation, clean rooms, etc. But that also makes a big barrier to entry for other people.
“People who come here are quite surprised that we have so much automation in what is quite a niche production sector. We’ve made huge investments in automation in recent years, a lot of it for quality control. There are cameras, CMM measuring equipment. We have six or seven machines checking things. We make 50,000 per year of some parts and we check 200 contact points on each of them.”
Thirty-year history
The company was set up by husband and wife team Malcom and Gillian Rae in 1991. The GEW initials are based on Gillian Rae’s maiden name, while marketing manager Duncan Smith says the EC part “was a nod to the European Community which was fairly new at the time, in order to appeal more broadly than just the UK.”
In the 1980s Malcolm Rae had been technical manager at Wallace Knight in Slough, which was one of the leaders in mercury arc UV lamp manufacture for the printing sector. The Slough factory is still running today under its current owner Baldwin, and renamed AMS Spectral UV.
However, Malcolm was made redundant in 1991 and believed he could design and manufacture his own UV systems more effectively than what he had been doing before by using extruded aluminium instead of sheet steel.
Robert Rae says that the reason that GEW specialised in narrow-web curing to start with was that his father built his first units at his home. “He worked in a cellar and it had narrow stairs. He had to build small systems so he could get them up the stairs!”
In the early years GEW was based in Reigate, Surrey and then in a factory unit in Redhill. Between 1992 and 1997 the company grew rapidly, employing more people, moving to larger premises and developing the product range further. Sales were direct with original equipment manufacturer (OEM) accounts, based mainly in Europe.
In 1999 GEW was awarded the Queen’s Award for Export Achievement, having doubled export sales in the preceding three years.
Its most recent move was in 2012 to Crawley in West Sussex, where it has two large, modern 3,700sqm factories. It’s now converting a 4,600sqm unit on the opposite side of the road, to be an additional highly automated manufacturing facility for mainly LED lamps.
Key personnel
Both Malcolm and Gillian Rae are still very involved in the company as senior directors, and the second generation of Raes is also working there. Their son Robert is managing director of sales and their daughter Eleanor is HR director. Both joined in 2013.
Other sales and marketing managers have a range of backgrounds and service times. Marcus Greenbrook, director of international sales, joined the company in 1998, while Jamie Neill has been there two years and is sales manager for UK & Ireland. Gary Doman, who has 30 years’ experience in the sector is international sales manager, sheetfed. Duncan Smith has been marketing manager for about six years. Bernd Prattl is CEO of GEW D-A-CH in Germany. James Hicks, engineering director, is a Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, with more than 20 years’ experience in UV.
In recognition of his achievements in founding and developing GEW (EC) into a major UV lamps manufacturer, Malcolm Rae is the winner of this year’s Global Achievement Award as part of the annual Label Industry Global Awards. The presentation will be made at LabelExpo Europe in Brussels in September.
The awards panel commented: “This recognises his unique contribution, through GEW, the company he founded, to the narrow web industry’s transition to UV curing and to the subsequent technological development of the UV curing industry.”
STAR PRODUCT
GEW’s biggest sellers are its E2C air-cooled low-energy arc lamps and the AeroLED lamps, both part of its ArcLED swappable system.
