Smiths Specialty Engineering

11,000 employees
£1,032m sales*
£141.7m headline operating profit*

*Source: Smiths Group plc Annual Report & Accounts 2007

Group Managing Director:

Paul Cox

Principal operating regions:

John Crane and Interconnect are global businesses.
Flex-Tek manufactures mainly in the US, but also in the UK, France, Malaysia and Mexico.

 

Smiths Specialty Engineering serves the international energy, communications and industrial markets. John Crane provides mechanical rotating seals used in process plants; Smiths Interconnect supplies components and sub-systems for connecting, protecting and controlling critical electronic and radio frequency systems; Flex-Tek provides ducting and hosing for a wide range of applications, mainly for heating & ventilation and domestic equipment.  For further information visit www.smiths-specialtyengineering.com

Customers & Markets

Smiths Specialty Engineering’s principal businesses – John Crane, Smiths Interconnect and Flex-Tek – serve the global energy, communications and industrial markets. John Crane primarily sells to oil and gas refineries and process industries; Smiths Interconnect sells to aircraft manufacturers, defence and wireless telecoms companies and Flex-Tek’s biggest customers are the domestic appliance and US construction industries.

Energy

• John Crane provides mechanical rotating seals, associated equipment and maintenance and support services for the oil and gas, petrochemical, pharmaceutical, pulp and paper; mining and other process industries.

Communications

• Smiths Interconnect provides a range of products including antenna systems, connectors and frequency sources for the aerospace and defence sector.
• In the wireless telecommunications sector, Smiths Interconnect supplies devices to protect base stations from power surges, as well as electronic components.
• In Space, Smiths Interconnect has components on a number of exploration vehicles, including Galileo, NPOESS, Mars Observer and the Deep Space Probe.

Industrial

• Flex-Tek designs and manufactures ducting, hosing, heating and ventilation equipment for the domestic appliance, US construction, aerospace and medical industries. Its flexible hosing is on the Dyson vacuum cleaner, for example.

In Action: Keeping energy moving when the pressure is on

John Crane delivers under pressure, all over the world. Our market-leading seals are deployed on the largest gas pipeline in the world in China. Elsewhere, John Crane technology is an integral part of the process that takes gas from its source in Qatar on to Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) tankers and then on to the UK National Grid, safely helping to deliver energy to millions of homes in the UK.

The reason for this global success is exceptional technology, for example John Crane gas seals can withstand the equivalent amount of pressure that would be experienced at 4,115 metres underwater (450 bar) - that’s four and a half times more than the most resilient military submarine can withstand. We know our seals perform, because we test them at our world leading gas seal testing facilities, which can subject seals to pressures of up to 800 bar.

And it’s not only our products that work hard under pressure. An oil rig breakdown can carry a price tag of up to £7 million pounds per day in lost revenue. Our service and support engineers are on hand to minimise downtime and regularly work in hostile offshore locations, enduring temperatures exceeding +60 degrees Celsius in Oman - which is reportedly the hottest inhabited place on earth - to -40 degrees Celsius under two meters of snow in Kazakhstan. The John Crane global team works hard to help make the world a more productive place.