Award Recipients

In 2022, MRT Castings was proud to receive the Queen’s Award for Enterprise for the second time in six years. Following its 2016 award for International Trade, MRT had experienced a further period of exceptional growth.

MRT produces aluminium diecastings and machined components for a wide range of UK and international customers. These components are used in applications as diverse as hi-fi equipment to supercars, and designer lighting to military control systems. One of the company’s largest markets has been in medical devices, and in particular, critical care ventilators.

When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, hospitals around the world were in desperate need of additional ventilators to treat critically ill patients. Since 2014 MRT have worked with one of the world’s leading manufacturers of these ventilators, supplying 21 components in each unit. Prior to the pandemic MRT produced approximately 4,000 kits of these precision engineered components each year, but between April 2020 and March 2021, MRT dramatically scaled up operations to manufacture over 26,000 sets, enabling our customer to supply life-saving ventilators to every corner of the globe.

MRT recently celebrated its 75th Anniversary. The family-owned business was originally established in London, then relocated to its current production base in Hampshire in 1965. They have steadily expanded the scale and complexity of their production facilities over the years, and just prior to the pandemic, opened a new, purpose-built, state-of-the-art diecasting foundry to accommodate future growth. They weren’t expecting to fill it quite so quickly, but with the challenge of rapidly scaling up operations to respond to the Covid-19 crisis, the business invested in additional diecasting cells and CNC machining centres, and almost doubled their workforce, instantly transforming the new foundry into a hive of productivity and innovation.

International sales grew by 437% over the three years to 2022, and the proportion of sales exported increased to 85% of total sales.

Managing Director, Phil Rawnson, explained “To have won two Queen’s Awards for Enterprise just six years apart is testament to the relentless energy and enthusiasm of our team, and to receive this honour during the company’s 75th anniversary year was particularly special.”