TWO businessmen who took over a Bolton plastics firm have moulded it into a thriving and profitable company with a bulging order book.

Now they are looking to take new staff on and move to a much larger building to accommodate their growing storage needs.

The men jointly own MG Stuma, which makes hundreds of different injection moulded plastic products, including high-tech plastic used in MoD army communications equipment, through to mass produced small plastic caps and filters.

It also makes items such as roller towel housings, which it assembles for its clients, microwave steamers, hard plastic helmets for the building industry and white water rafting protective head gear, among many others.

Managing director, Neil Redmayne and his uncle John Sturgess, originally owned Darwen based MG Plastics but could not find larger premises in that area.

Having searched and failed to find a suitable location they eventually ended up buying Stuma Plastics based at Atlas Works in Mornington Road, Bolton.

A serious dip in the order book at Stuma early last year prompted them to merge the two companies, saving on doubled up costs like business rates, administration and transport, which enabled them to be more competitive by passing on cost savings to their customers.

Mr Redmayne said that most of the staff transferred with them to Bolton, with only a few unable to make the journey.

In an an effort to retain trained staff the company has helped with the extra transport costs.

MG Stuma offers a full cad-cam design service from conceptual prototypes to full scale production and makes components for the hygiene, safety, medical and security industries.

Now the company desperately needs to find larger premises with much larger storage capacity and which will be suitable for their huge state of the art plastic extrusion machines.

Mr Redmayne said: “As we use a lot of power we couldn’t find anything in Darwen with a good enough power supply. If we had we would have probably taken the Bolton operation to Darwen.

“Since we merged our sales have surged and to keep up with the orders we will have to start a 24-hour weekend shift and now we need technical staff and production staff.”

Though the company does export to Europe and America most of its work is in the North West within a 50 to 70 mile radius which allows them to offer flexible delivery times to customers.

Turnover last month topped £600,000 — almost double the combined monthly turnover of both companies before the merger — and they are aiming for a £7 million annual turnover this year.