AxFlow Service UK - growing with an engineering approach
AxFlow UK's service business has grown from 20 percent of sales in 2016 to 40 percent in 2022. In 2023, the figure is expected to hit 50 percent as the company transitions from a distribution-based model to an engineering-based approach.
Market forces, including a desire among customers to prolong equipment life and to buy from suppliers that also maintain, repair and even upgrade the products they provide, are driving this shift.
Ben Davis, Commercial Manager at AxFlow UK, says: “We need to have a competitive edge and to give our customers as many options as possible. It’s not just about selling them a replacement pump, but also about being able to offer the option to repair what they have.”
This is an area in which AxFlow UK has invested strongly in recent years, and the investments are paying off. In 2022, the company completed a challenging delivery of a high-capacity pumping solution to Slough Heat and Power, a large electricity generator in southern England that converted from coal-fired generation to renewables. AxFlow UK was tasked with delivering a system powered by renewables with 20 percent higher output than the old system, but with less than half the carbon emission footprint. The company had previously handled pump refurbishment product projects of a similar scale. But it had never designed and built such a system from scratch before.
“For us it demonstrated that we should never be put off by a challenge,” Ben says. “We highlighted our engineering skillset and showed that we have a team that can not only design and specify pumps, but deliver a complete solution.”