Owens Road Services to move to Port Talbot

Leading South Wales haulage firm Owens Road Services says it hopes to create 200 jobs when it opens its new headquarters in Port Talbot. Owens has just secured the lease on the 128,000sq ft site and hopes to complete the move from its current Llanelli, Carmarthenshire, base by October.

Compliance manager Les Watts says Owens has almost concluded negotiations with a large international company to offer production and storage operations at the site, formerly the Panasonic factory which closed last year. Watts anticipates the creation of up to 200 jobs through the move.

Owens already has five warehouses on the surrounding industrial estate, Baglan Energy Park. Watts says the move to the new site is in response to the company's growth and the lack of work in Llanelli. He says: "We're getting bigger and bigger every day. We have to go after the work."

The company is diversifying and has taken on new work, primarily supermarket distribution, in response to the loss of around 15% of its business due to the reduction in capacity of the Corus plant in Trostre, South Wales. "The news was dropped on us about a month ago. We could see what was going to happen," Watts says.

"We're always looking for other things. You have to go forward [as a business], you have to go out there and create something." Owens will retain its site in Dafen, Llanelli and will run a number of operations from there.