Textron relocating Jacobsen production to United Kingdom

Textron Specialized Vehicles announced it will relocate all manufacturing of Jacobsen professional turf equipment to its facility in Ipswich, United Kingdom. The move will begin this fall and be completed in stages over the next several months.

 

This move will enable the company to focus its investments, skill and improvements in mower production on a single facility, and leverage existing resources and expertise at its Ipswich facility. The plant, which currently builds Jacobsen and Ransomes mowers, is the oldest manufacturer of motorized lawn mowers in the world, in operation for more than 187 years.

 

The U.K. facility will produce mowers for all regions, including North America. Jacobsen will maintain its sales, parts, and customer-care teams in North America, and its network of North American distributors, to serve its customers in the United States and Canada.

 

“We are excited to establish our Ipswich, U.K. facility as the worldwide manufacturing center of excellence for Jacobsen equipment,” said Simon Rainger, Vice President, Turf for Textron Specialized Vehicles. “This move will enable us to operate more efficiently, and expand on the legacy of innovation and quality that our Ipswich plant has built over its long history.” 

 

In a call with members of the industry media Thursday, Rainger said that 30 to 35 percent of Jacobsen products had been manufacturing in Ipswich over the last five years. Jacobsen relocated North American production from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Augusta, Georgia, in 2016. 

 

“In the last two years, that number has been probably been raised to 50 percent coming out of Ipswich as the business moves to coming out of these consolidated platforms and that was a strategic decision to allow multi-site manufacturing of the same products,” Rainger added. “I think the reality with the volumes that we see out there today and what has been effectively a shrinking marketplace didn’t lend itself to multiple manufacturing locations.”

 

Jacobsen continues to develop new products to serve customers around the globe. The brand will launch a robust slate of new mowers in coming months, including the quiet, highly efficient Eclipse 360 ELiTE electric greens mower powered by Samsung SDI lithium-battery technology, and the new AR530 and AR730 area rotary mowers, designed to be safer, easier and more cost-effective to maintain and operate.